Waveshift 2.0: An Improved Physics-Driven Data Augmentation Strategy in Fine-Grained Image Classification

This paper presents Waveshift Augmentation 2.0 (WS 2.0), an enhanced version of the previously proposed Waveshift Augmentation (WS 1.0), a novel data augmentation technique inspired by light propagation dynamics in optical systems. While WS 1.0 introduced phase-based wavefront transformations under the assumption of an infinitesimally small aperture, WS 2.0 incorporates an additional aperture-dependent hyperparameter that models real-world optical attenuation. This refinement enables broader frequency modulation and greater diversity in image transformations while preserving compatibility with well-established data augmentation pipelines such as CLAHE, AugMix, and RandAugment. Evaluated across a wide range of tasks, including medical imaging, fine-grained object recognition, and grayscale image classification, WS 2.0 consistently outperformed both WS 1.0 and standard geometric augmentation. Notably, when benchmarked against geometric augmentation alone, it achieved average macro-F1 improvements of +1.48 (EfficientNetV2), +0.65 (ConvNeXt), and +0.73 (Swin Transformer), with gains of up to +9.32 points in medical datasets. These results demonstrate that WS 2.0 advances physics-based augmentation by enhancing generalization without sacrificing modularity or preprocessing efficiency, offering a scalable and realistic augmentation strategy for complex imaging domains.