Mixup Data Augmentation for COVID-19 Infection Percentage Estimation

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic considerably increased the workload in hospitals. In this context, the availability of proper diagnostic tools is very important in the fight against this virus. Scientific research is constantly making its contribution in this direction. Actually, there are many scientific initiatives including challenges that require to develop deep algorithms that analyse X-ray or Computer Tomography (CT) images of lungs. One of these concerns a challenge whose topic is the prediction of the percentage of COVID-19 infection in chest CT images. In this paper, we present our contribution to the COVID-19 Infection Percentage Estimation Competition organised in conjunction with the ICIAP 2021 Conference. The proposed method employs algorithms for classification problems such as Inception-v3 and the technique of data augmentation mixup on COVID-19 images. Moreover, the mixup methodology is applied for the first time in radiological images of lungs affected by COVID-19 infection, with the aim to infer the infection degree with slice-level precision. Our approach achieved promising results despite the specific constrains defined by the rules of the challenge, in which our solution entered in the final ranking.