When deep learning is applied to visual object recognition, data augmentation is often used to generate additional training data without extra labeling cost. It helps to reduce overfitting and increase the performance of the algorithm. In this paper we investigate if it is possible to use data augmentation as the main component of an unsupervised feature learning architecture. To that end we sample a set of random image patches and declare each of them to be a separate single-image surrogate class. We then extend these trivial one-element classes by applying a variety of transformations to the initial 'seed' patches. Finally we train a convolutional neural network to discriminate between these surrogate classes. The feature representation learned by the network can then be used in various vision tasks. We find that this simple feature learning algorithm is surprisingly successful, achieving competitive classification results on several popular vision datasets (STL-10, CIFAR-10, Caltech-101).

本文研究如何将数据增强应用于无监督特征学习，我们将各种变换应用于随机图像块，通过卷积神经网络分类学习到有用的特征表示，同时实验结果显示这一算法能在多个视觉数据集上取得较为有竞争性的分类结果。

通过增强单个图像进行无监督特征学习