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SIGNIFICANCE The automatic generation algorithm of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) can generate a large amount of simulation images by a relatively small number of real images, which can effectively improve the classification performance. AIM We propose an automatic generation algorithm for retinal OCT images based on GAN to alleviate the problem of insufficient images with high quality in deep learning, and put the diagnosis algorithm toward clinical application. APPROACH We designed a generation network based on GAN and trained the network with a data set constructed by 2014_BOE_Srinivasan and OCT2017 to acquire three models. Then, we generated a large number of images by three models to augment Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) and normal images. We evaluated the generated images by subjective visual observation, Fréchet inception distance (FID) scores and a classification experiment. RESULTS Visual observation shows that the generated images have the clear and similar features compared with the real images. Also, the lesion regions containing similar features in the real image and the generated image are randomly distributed in the image field of view. When the FID scores of the three types of generated images are lowest, three local optimal models are obtained for AMD, DME and normal images. FID scores indicate the generated images with high quality and diversity. Moreover, the classification experiment results show that the model performance trained with the mixed images is better than that of the model trained with real images, in which the accuracy, the sensitivity and the specificity are improved by 5.56%, 8.89%, and 2.22%. In addition, compared with the generation method based on Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE), the method improved the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity by 1.97%, 2.97% and 0.99%, for the same test set. CONCLUSIONS The results show that our method can augment the three kinds of OCT images, not only effectively alleviating the problem of insufficient images with high quality but also improving the diagnosis performance. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.