Training Neural Networks with Very Little Data - A Draft.

Deep neural networks are complex architectures composed of many layers of nodes, resulting in a large number of parameters including weights and biases that must be estimated through training the network. Larger and more complex networks typically require more training data for adequate convergence than their more simple counterparts. The data available to train these networks is often limited or imbalanced. We propose the radial transform in polar coordinate space for image augmentation to facilitate the training of neural networks from limited source data. Pixel-wise coordinate transforms provide representations of the original image in the polar coordinate system and both augment data as well as increase the diversity of poorly represented classes. Experiments performed on MNIST and a set of multimodal medical images using the AlexNet and GoogLeNet neural network models show high classification accuracy using the proposed method.