Neural Style Transfer and Geometric Transformations for Data Augmentation on Balinese Carving Recognition using MobileNet

The preservation of Balinese carving data is a challenge in recognition of Balinese carving. Balinese carvings are a cultural heritage found in traditional buildings in Bali. The collection of Balinese carving images from public images can be a solution for preserving cultural heritage. However, the lousy quality of taking photographs, e.g., skewed shots, can affect the recognition results. Research on the Balinese carving recognition has existed but only recognizes a predetermined image. We proposed a Neural Style Geometric Transformation (NSGT) as a data augmentation technique for Balinese carvings recognition. NSGT is combining Neural Style Transfers and Geometric Transformations for a small dataset solution. This method provides variations in color, lighting, rotation, rescale, zoom, and the size of the training dataset, to improve recognition performance. We use MobileNet as a feature extractor because it has a small number of parameters, which makes it suitable to be applied on mobile devices. Eight scenarios were tested based on image styles and geometric transformations to get the best results. Based on the results, the proposed method can improve accuracy by up to 16.2%.