A Semantic-aware Attention and Visual Shielding Network for Cloth-changing Person Re-identification

Cloth-changing person reidentification (ReID) is a newly emerging research topic that aims to retrieve pedestrians whose clothes are changed. Since the human appearance with different clothes exhibits large variations, it is very difficult for existing approaches to extract discriminative and robust feature representations. Current works mainly focus on body shape or contour sketches, but the human semantic information and the potential consistency of pedestrian features before and after changing clothes are not fully explored or are ignored. To solve these issues, in this work, a novel semantic-aware attention and visual shielding network for cloth-changing person ReID (abbreviated as SAVS) is proposed where the key idea is to shield clues related to the appearance of clothes and only focus on visual semantic information that is not sensitive to view/posture changes. Specifically, a visual semantic encoder is first employed to locate the human body and clothing regions based on human semantic segmentation information. Then, a human semantic attention module (HSA) is proposed to highlight the human semantic information and reweight the visual feature map. In addition, a visual clothes shielding module (VCS) is also designed to extract a more robust feature representation for the cloth-changing task by covering the clothing regions and focusing the model on the visual semantic information unrelated to the clothes. Most importantly, these two modules are jointly explored in an end-to-end unified framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods, and more robust features can be extracted for cloth-changing persons. Compared with FSAM (published in CVPR 2021), this method can achieve improvements of 32.7% (16.5%) and 14.9% (-) on the LTCC and PRCC datasets in terms of mAP (rank-1), respectively.

Multigranular Visual-Semantic Embedding for Cloth-Changing Person Re-identification

Person reidentification (ReID) is a very hot research topic in machine learning and computer vision, and many person ReID approaches have been proposed; however, most of these methods assume that the same person has the same clothes within a short time interval, and thus their visual appearance must be similar. However, in an actual surveillance environment, a given person has a great probability of changing clothes after a long time span, and they also often take different personal belongings with them. When the existing person ReID methods are applied in this type of case, almost all of them fail. To date, only a few works have focused on the cloth-changing person ReID task, but since it is very difficult to extract generalized and robust features for representing people with different clothes, their performances need to be improved. Moreover, visual-semantic information is often ignored. To solve these issues, in this work, a novel multigranular visual-semantic embedding algorithm (MVSE) is proposed for cloth-changing person ReID, where visual semantic information and human attributes are embedded into the network, and the generalized features of human appearance can be well learned to effectively solve the problem of clothing changes. Specifically, to fully represent a person with clothing changes, a multigranular feature representation scheme (MGR) is employed to focus on the unchanged part of the human, and then a cloth desensitization network (CDN) is designed to improve the feature robustness of the approach for the person with different clothing, where different high-level human attributes are fully utilized. Moreover, to further solve the issue of pose changes and occlusion under different camera perspectives, a partially semantically aligned network (PSA) is proposed to obtain the visual-semantic information that is used to align the human attributes.