Constrained Center Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks

From the feature representation's point of view, the feature learning module of a convolutional neural network (CNN) is to transform an input pattern into a feature vector. This feature vector is then multiplied with a number of output weight vectors to produce softmax scores. The common training objective in CNNs is based on the softmax loss, which ignores the intra-class compactness. This brief proposes a constrained center loss (CCL)-based algorithm to extract robust features. The training objective of a CNN consists of two terms, softmax loss and CCL. The aim of the softmax loss is to push the feature vectors from different classes apart. Meanwhile, the CCL aims at clustering the feature vectors such that the feature vectors from the same classes are close together. Instead of using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms to learn all the connection weights and the cluster centers at the same time. Our CCL-based algorithm is based on the alternative learning strategy. We first fix the connection weights of the CNN and update the cluster centers based on an analytical formula, which can be implemented based on the minibatch concept. We then fix the cluster centers and update the connection weights for a number of SGD minibatch iterations. We also propose a simplified CCL (SCCL) algorithm. Experiments are performed on six commonly used benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that the two proposed algorithms outperform several state-of-the-art approaches.