Addressing the Intra-class Mode Collapse Problem using Adaptive Input Image Normalization in GAN-based X-ray Images

Abstract

Biomedical image datasets can be imbalanced due to the rarity of targeted diseases. Generative Adversarial Networks play a key role in addressing this imbalance by enabling the generation of synthetic images to augment and balance datasets. It is important to generate synthetic images that incorporate a diverse range of features such that they accurately represent the distribution of features present in the training imagery. Furthermore, the absence of diverse features in synthetic images can degrade the performance of machine learning classifiers. The mode collapse problem can impact a Generative Adversarial Network's capacity to generate diversified images. The mode collapse comes in two varieties; intra-class and inter-class. In this paper, the intra-class mode collapse problem is investigated, and its subsequent impact on the diversity of synthetic X-ray images is evaluated. This work contributes an empirical demonstration of the benefits of integrating the adaptive input-image normalization for the Deep Convolutional GAN to alleviate the intra-class mode collapse problem. Results demonstrate that the DCGAN with adaptive input-image normalization outperforms DCGAN with un-normalized X-ray images as evident by the superior diversity scores.