EvenFace: Deep Face Recognition with Uniform Distribution of Identities

Abstract

The development of loss functions over the past few years has brought great success to face recognition. Most algorithms focus on improving the intra-class compactness of face features but ignore the inter-class separability. In this paper, we propose a method named EvenFace, which introduces a regularization variance item and a mean term of inter-class separability to further promote the even distribution of class centers on the hypersphere, thereby increasing the inter-class distance. In order to evaluate the inter-class separability, a new index is proposed to better reflect the distribution of class centers and guide the classification. By penalizing the angle between each identity and its surrounding neighbors, the resulting uniform distribution of identities enables full exploitation of the feature space, leading to discriminative face representations. Our proposed loss function can effectively boost the performance of softmax loss variants. Quantitative comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of EvenFace.