Margin Loss: Making Faces More Separable

Riqiang Gao, Fuwei Yang, Wenming Yang, Qingmin Liao

Abstract: The key point of face recognition is creating a discriminative feature representation to ensure intraclass compactness and interclass separability. Softmax loss is widely used in deep learning networks, but it is indirect for face verification. Center loss is effective to improve intraclass compactness, while interclass distances are ignored. In this letter, we propose a novel loss function, termed margin loss, to enlarge distances of interclass and reduce intraclass variations simultaneously. Margin loss aims to focus on samples hard to classify by a distance margin. Different from Softmax loss, margin loss is based on Euclidean distances that can directly measure face similarity. Experiments on different datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.