GANs to augment training data

Question

I have been reading about Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and was wondering if it would make sense to train a generator function only to use it for creating more training data.

In a scenario where I don't have enough training data to build a robust classifier, can I use this limited data to train a generator that'll produce samples good enough to improve the accuracy of my discriminator (classifier)?

Answer 1

Yes and no depending on how you define "good enough samples". You will likely end up with a chicken and egg problem: you want to use the GAN to generate training data, but the GAN doesn't have enough training data itself to generate convincing enough samples.

Other techniques exist for data synthesis of training images. For example: adding noise, flipping axis, change luminosity, change color, random cropping, random distorsion.