Pretraining vs Data Augmentation: What Matters More for Semantic Segmentation on a Laptop?

TL;DR: On a small semantic segmentation task (Oxford-IIIT Pet) trained on a MacBook, ImageNet pretraining clearly helped more than heavier data augmentation. Pretraining gave me ~+3.8 mIoU points on average with essentially the same training time. Heavy augmentation was almost a wash. Why I Ran This Experiment Semantic segmentation models are usually trained on big GPUs with big datasets. But most…