Data Augmentation Using Generative Adversarial Networks to Reduce Data Imbalance with Application in Car Damage Detection

Automatic car damage detection and assessment are very useful in alleviating the burden of manual inspection associated with car insurance claims. This will help filter out any frivolous claims that can take up time and money to process. This problem falls into the image classification category and there has been significant progress in this field using deep learning. However, deep learning models require a large number of images for training and oftentimes this is hampered because of the lack of datasets of suitable images. This research investigates data augmentation techniques using Generative Adversarial Networks to increase the size and improve the class balance of a dataset used for training deep learning models for car damage detection and classification. We compare the performance of such an approach with one that uses a conventional data augmentation technique and with another that does not use any data augmentation. Our experiment shows that this approach has a significant improvement compared to another that does not use data augmentation and has a slight improvement compared to one that uses conventional data augmentation.