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clever image augmentation - random zoom out

i'm building a CNN to identify facial keypoints. i want to make the net more robust, so i thought about applying some zoom-out transforms because most pictures have about the same location of keypoints, so the net doesn't learn much.
my approach:
i want augmented images to keep the original image size so apply MaxPool2d and then random (not equal) padding until the original size is reached.
first question
is it going to work with simple average padding or zero padding? i'm sure it would be even better if i made the padding appear more like a background but is there a simple way to do that?
second question
the keypoints are the target vector, they come as a row vector of 30. i'm getting confused with the logic needed to transform them to the smaller space.
generally if an original point was at (x=5,y=7) it transforms to (x=2,y=3)- i'm not sure about it but so far manually checked and it's correct. but what to do if to keypoints are in the same new pixel? i can't feed the network with less target values.
that's it. would be happy to hear your thoughts

I suggest to use torchvision.transforms.RandomResizedCrop as a part of your Compose statement. which will give you random zooms AND resize the resulting the images to some standard size. This avoids issues in both your questions.

CV2 resizing with CNN

I am using CV2 to resize various images with different dimensions(i.e. 70*300, 800*500, 60*50) to a specific (200*200) pixels dimension. Later, I am feeding the pictures to CNN algorithm to classify the images. (my understanding that pictures must have the same size when fed into CNN).
My questions:
1- How low picture resolutions are converted into higher one and how higher resolutions are converted into lower one? Will this affect the stored information in the pictures
2- Is it good practice to use this approach with CNN? Or is it better to Pad zeros to the end of the image to get the desired resolution? I have seen many researchers pad the end of a file with zeros when trying to detect Malware files to have a common dimension for all the files. Does this mean that padding is more accurate than resizing?

Using interpolation. https://chadrick-kwag.net/cv2-resize-interpolation-methods/
Definitely, resizing is a lossy process and you'll lose information.
Both are okay and used depending on the needs. Resizing is also equally applicable. If your CNN can't differentiate between the original and resized images it must be a badly overfitted one. Resizing is a very light regularization too, even it's advisable to apply more augmentation schemes on the images before CNN training.

Getting started with denoising elements of a 200x200 numpy array

I have a 200x200 numpy array that has a shape in it which I can see when I graph it using matplotlib's imshow() function. However, there is also a lot of noise added in that picture. I am trying to use openCV to emphasize the shape and denoise the image. But it keeps throwing error messages that I don't understand. What should I do to get started on the denoising problem. The shape is visible to me as I see it but extra noise was added using the np.random.randint() function on top of the image. I want to reduce that noise

Here are some tutorials about image denoising techniques available in opencv.
Blurring out the noise
The most basic is applying a blur to average out the random noise. This will have the negative effect that the edges in the image will not be as sharp as originally. Depending on your application, this might be fine. Depending on the amount of noise, you can chance the size of the filter k. A larger value will produce a blurrier image with less noise.
k = 5
filtered_image = cv.blur(img,(k,k))
Advanced denoising
Alternatively, you can use more advanced techniques such as Non-local Means Denoising. This applies averaging across similar patches in the image. This technique has a few more parameters to tune to your specific application which you can read about here. (There are different versions of this function for greyscale and colour images, as well as for image sequences).
luminosity_filter_strength = 10
colour_filter_strength = 10
template_window_size = 7
search_window_size = 21
filtered_image = cv.fastNlMeansDenoisingColored(img,
luminosity_filter_strength,
colour_filter_strength,
template_window_size,
search_window_size)

I solved the problem using Scikit Image. They have very accessible documentation page for new comers and the error messages are a lot easier to understand. As for my problem I had to use Scikit Image's restoration library which has a lot of denoising functions much like openCV however the examples and the easy to understand error messages really helped. Playing around with Bilateral filters and Non-local Means Denoising solved the problem for me.

Add chroma noise to image

I'm training a deep neural network to improve the quality of images. The images contain some specific types of noise that I want to reduce/remove by means of a deep learning model. In order to do so I'm using a huge dataset of similar clear high-res images with barely any noise, add the specific types of noise to the images and train the network on regenerating the original image (a custom autoencoder network). With one of the several noise types this works very well so far. Without going to far into the details, adding that particular type of noise was easy.
Now I need to add another noise type to the images, more precisely: chroma noise like in the following image (the bottom right one): link
How do I artificially generate and add chroma noise to an image in Python? I can use the full range of image processing packages, PIL, numpy, OpenCV, torchvision...

You need to convert the image to a colorspace such as HSV or CIE Lab. You then add noise to the chromacity channels (a, b in Lab, or H, S is HSV). Finally, convert back to RGB.
This colorspace conversion step is very common and most image toolkits should have that functionality.

Python: Blur specific region in an image

I'm trying to blur around specific regions in a 2D image (the data is an array of size m x n).
The points are specified by an m x n mask. cv2 and scikit avaiable.
I tried:
Simply applying blur filters to the masked image. But that isn't not working.
Extracting the points to blur by np.nan the rest, blurring and reassembling. Also not working, because the blur obviously needs the surrounding points to work correctly.
Any ideas?
Cheers

What was the result in the first case? It sounds like a good approach. What did you expect and what you get?
You can also try something like that:
Either create a copy of a whole image or just slightly bigger ROI (to include samples that will be used for blurring)
Apply blur on the created image
Apply masks on two images (from original image take everything except ROI and from blurred image take ROI)
Add two masked images
If you want more smooth transition make sure that masks aren't binary. You can smooth them using another blurring (blur one mask and create the second one by calculating: mask2 = 1 - mask1. By doing so you will be sure that weights always add up to one).