FICAL: Focal InterClass Angular Loss for Image Classification Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied in various image analysis tasks and gradually become one of the most powerful machine learning approaches. In order to improve the capability of the model generalization and performance in image classification, a new trend is to learn more discriminative features via CNNs. The main contribution of this paper is to increase the angles between the categories to extract discriminative features and enlarge the interclass variance. To this end, we propose a loss function named focal interclass angular loss (FICAL) which introduces the confusion rateweighted cosine distance as the similarity measurement between categories. This measurement is dynamically evaluated during each iteration to adapt the model. Compared with other loss functions, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FICAL achieved best performance among the referred loss functions on two image classificaton datasets.

Competing Ratio Loss for Multiclass image Classification Crossentropy loss function (CEL) is widely used for training a multiclass classification deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). While CEL has been successfully implemented in image classification tasks, it only focuses on the posterior probability of correct class when the labels of training images are onehot. It cannot be discriminated against the classes not belong to correct class (wrong classes) directly. Negative Log Likelihood Ratio Loss (NLLR) is proposed to better discriminate the correct class from competing wrong classes. But optimization of the loss function is normally presented as a minimization problem. In training DCNN, the value of NLLR is not constantly positive or negative, which affects the convergence of NLLR adversely. So, we propose competing ratio loss (CRL), which calculates the posterior probability ratio between the correct class and competing wrong classes to better widen the difference between the probability of the correct class and the probabilities of wrong classes, which also assures the value of CRL is constantly positive. Through massive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CRL on deep convolutional neural networks, our CRL outperforms CEL and NLLR on CIFAR10100 datasets.