Albumentations is an open-source image augmentation library created in June 2018 by a group of researchers and engineers, including Alexander Buslaev, Vladimir Iglovikov, and Alex Parinov. The library was designed to provide a flexible and efficient framework for data augmentation in computer vision tasks.

Albumentations
Original author(s)
  • Alexander Buslaev
  • Alex Parinov
  • Vladimir I. Iglovikov
  • Evegene Khvedchenya
  • Mikhail Druzhinin
Initial releaseSeptember 2016; 8 years ago (2016-09)[1]
Repositorygithub.com/albumentations-team/albumentations
Written in
Operating system
Available inEnglish
TypeLibrary for machine learning and deep learning
LicenseMIT[2]
Websitealbumentations.ai

Data augmentation is a technique that involves artificially expanding the size of a dataset by creating new images through various transformations such as rotation, scaling, flipping, and color adjustments. This process helps improve the performance of machine learning models by providing a more diverse set of training examples.

Built on top of OpenCV, a widely used computer vision library, Albumentations provides high-performance implementations of various image processing functions. It also offers a rich set of image transformation functions and a simple API for combining them, allowing users to create custom augmentation pipelines tailored to their specific needs.[3]

Adoption

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Albumentations has gained significant popularity and recognition in the computer vision and deep learning community since its introduction in 2018. The library was designed to provide a flexible and efficient framework for data augmentation in computer vision tasks, and has been widely adopted in academic research, open-source projects, and machine learning competitions.

The library's research paper, "Albumentations: Fast and Flexible Image Augmentations," has received over 1000 citations, highlighting its importance and impact in the field of computer vision.[4] The library has also been widely adopted in computer vision and deep learning projects, with over 12,000 packages depending on it as listed on its GitHub dependents page.[5]

In addition, Albumentations has been used in many winning solutions for computer vision competitions, including the DeepFake Detection challenge at Kaggle with a prize of 1 million dollars.[6]

Example

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The following program shows the functionality of the library with a simple example:

import albumentations as A
import cv2

# Declare an augmentation pipeline
transform = A.Compose([
    A.RandomCrop(width=256, height=256),
    A.HorizontalFlip(p=0.5),
    A.RandomBrightnessContrast(p=0.2),
])

# Read an image with OpenCV and convert it to the RGB colorspace
image = cv2.imread("image.jpg")
image = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2RGB)

# Augment an image
transformed = transform(image=image)
transformed_image = transformed["image"]

References

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  1. ^ "First Commit". GitHub. 5 June 2018.
  2. ^ "MIT License". GitHub.
  3. ^ Alexander Buslaev; Vladimir Iglovikov; Alex Parinov; Eugene Khvedchenya; Alexandr A Kalinin (2020). "Albumentations: Fast and Flexible Image Augmentations". Information. 11 (2). MDPI: 125. arXiv:1809.06839. doi:10.3390/info11020125.
  4. ^ "Google Scholar - Albumentations: Fast and Flexible Image Augmentations". Google Scholar. Retrieved 2023-03-31.
  5. ^ "Albumentations GitHub Dependents". GitHub. Retrieved 2023-03-31.
  6. ^ "Albumentations - Who's Using?". Albumentations. Retrieved 2023-03-31.
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