Pre-trained SAM as data augmentation for image segmentation

Data augmentation plays an important role in training deep neural model by expanding the size and diversity of the dataset. Initially, data augmentation mainly involved some simple transformations of images. Later, in order to increase the diversity and complexity of data, more advanced methods appeared and evolved to sophisticated generative models. However, these methods required a mass of computation of training or searching. In this paper, a novel training-free method that utilises the Pre-Trained Segment Anything Model (SAM) model as a data augmentation tool (PTSAM-DA) is proposed to generate the augmented annotations for images. Without the need for training, it obtains prompt boxes from the original annotations and then feeds the boxes to the pre-trained SAM to generate diverse and improved annotations. In this way, annotations are augmented more ingenious than simple manipulations without incurring huge computation for training a data augmentation model. Multiple comparative experiments on three datasets are conducted, including an in-house dataset, ADE20K and COCO2017. On this in-house dataset, namely Agricultural Plot Segmentation Dataset, maximum improvements of 3.77% and 8.92% are gained in two mainstream metrics, mIoU and mAcc, respectively. Consequently, large vision models like SAM are proven to be promising not only in image segmentation but also in data augmentation.