CA-LOSS: A Cosine Affinity Loss for Imbalanced SAR Ship Classification

To address the problem of imbalanced datasets in SAR ship classification, this paper presents a novel cosine affinity (CA) loss that enhances the Gaussian affinity (GA) loss. The CA loss focuses on the angular relationship between feature vectors, prioritizing their direction over their magnitude, which is advantageous for high-dimensional space analysis. In addition, class weights are incorporated to compute weighted distances. Importantly, the proposed CA loss does not increase the computational complexity of algorithm, nor does it lead to overfitting problems associated with data-level techniques. Through various experiments, its effectiveness has been demonstrated by achieving the highest F1 score and recall compared to other existing loss functions, highlighting its superior ability to classify minority classes in FUSARShip.