The Imaginative Generative Adversarial Network: Automatic Data Augmentation for Dynamic Skeleton-Based Hand Gesture and Human Action Recognition

Deep learning approaches deliver state-of-the-art performance in recognition of spatiotemporal human motion data. However, one of the main challenges in these recognition tasks is limited available training data. Insufficient training data results in over-fitting and data augmentation is one approach to address this challenge. Existing data augmentation strategies, such as transformations including scaling, shifting and interpolating, require hyperparameter optimization that can easily cost hundreds of GPU hours. In this paper, we present a novel automatic data augmentation model, the Imaginative Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that approximates the distribution of the input data and samples new data from this distribution. It is automatic in that it requires no data inspection and little hyperparameter tuning and therefore it is a low-cost and low-effort approach to generate synthetic data. The proposed data augmentation strategy is fast to train and the synthetic data leads to higher recognition accuracy than using data augmented with a classical approach.