Range Loss for Deep Face Recognition With Long-Tailed Training Data

Xiao Zhang, Zhiyuan Fang, Yandong Wen, Zhifeng Li, Yu Qiao; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017, pp. 5409-5418

Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved significant improvements on face recognition task due to their ability to learn highly discriminative features from tremendous amounts of face images. Many large scale face datasets exhibit long-tail distribution where a small number of entities (persons) have large number of face images while a large number of persons only have very few face samples (long tail). Most of the existing works alleviate this problem by simply cutting the tailed data and only keep identities with enough number of examples. Unlike these work, this paper investigated how long-tailed data impact the training of face CNNs and develop a novel loss function, called range loss, to effectively utilize the tailed data in training process. More specifically, range loss is designed to reduce overall intrapersonal variations while enlarge inter-personal differences simultaneously. Extensive experiments on two face recognition benchmarks, Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) and YouTube Faces (YTF), demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed range loss in overcoming the long tail effect, and show the good generalization ability of the proposed methods.