value of steps per epoch passed to keras fit generator function

Question

What is the need for setting steps_per_epoch value when calling the function fit_generator() when ideally it should be number of total samples/ batch size?

Answer 1

Without data augmentation, the number of samples is static as Daniel mentioned. Then, the number of samples for training is steps_per_epoch * batch size.

By using ImageDataGenerator in Keras, we make additional training data for data augmentation. Therefore, the number of samples for training can be set by yourself. If you want two times training data, just set steps_per_epoch as (original sample size *2)/batch_size.