SSGAN: A Semantic Similarity-Based GAN for Small-Sample Image Augmentation

Image sample augmentation refers to strategies for increasing sample size by modifying current data or synthesizing new data based on existing data. This technique is of vital significance in enhancing the performance of downstream learning tasks in widespread small-sample scenarios. In recent years, GAN-based image augmentation methods have gained significant attention and research focus. They have achieved remarkable generation results on large-scale datasets. However, their performance tends to be unsatisfactory when applied to datasets with limited samples. Therefore, this paper proposes a semantic similarity-based small-sample image augmentation method named SSGAN. Firstly, a relatively shallow pyramid-structured GAN-based backbone network was designed, aiming to enhance the model’s feature extraction capabilities to adapt to small sample sizes. Secondly, a feature selection module based on high-dimensional semantics was designed to optimize the loss function, thereby improving the model’s learning capacity. Lastly, extensive comparative experiments and comprehensive ablation experiments were carried out on the “Flower” and “Animal” datasets. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms other classical GANs methods in well-established evaluation metrics such as FID and IS, with improvements of 18.6 and 1.4, respectively. The dataset augmented by SSGAN significantly enhances the performance of the classifier, achieving a 2.2% accuracy improvement compared to the best-known method. Furthermore, SSGAN demonstrates excellent generalization and robustness.