Large-Scale Spatio-Temporal Person Re-identification: Algorithm and Benchmark

Person re-identification (re-ID) in the scenario with large spatial and temporal spans has not been fully explored. This is partially because that, existing benchmark datasets were mainly collected with limited spatial and temporal ranges, e.g., using videos recorded in a few days by cameras in a specific region of the campus. Such limited spatial and temporal ranges make it hard to simulate the difficulties of person re-ID in real scenarios. In this work, we contribute a novel Large-scale Spatio-Temporal (LaST) person re-ID dataset, including 10,860 identities with more than 224k images. Compared with existing datasets, LaST presents more challenging and high-diversity reID settings, and significantly larger spatial and temporal ranges. For instance, each person can appear in different cities or countries, and in various time slots from daytime to night, and in different seasons from spring to winter. To our best knowledge, LaST is a novel person re-ID dataset with the largest spatiotemporal ranges. Based on LaST, we verified its challenge by conducting a comprehensive performance evaluation of 14 re-ID algorithms. We further propose an easy-to-implement baseline that works well on such challenging re-ID setting. We also verified that models pre-trained on LaST can generalize well on existing datasets with short-term and cloth-changing scenarios. We expect LaST to inspire future works toward more realistic and challenging re-ID tasks. More information about the dataset is available at https://github.com/shuxjweb/last.git.

Graph Consistency Based Mean-Teaching for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification

Recent works show that mean-teaching is an effective framework for unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification. However, existing methods perform contrastive learning on selected samples between teacher and student networks, which is sensitive to noises in pseudo labels and neglects the relationship among most samples. Moreover, these methods are not effective in cooperation of different teacher networks. To handle these issues, this paper proposes a Graph Consistency based Mean-Teaching (GCMT) method with constructing the Graph Consistency Constraint (GCC) between teacher and student networks. Specifically, given unlabeled training images, we apply teacher networks to extract corresponding features and further construct a teacher graph for each teacher network to describe the similarity relationships among training images. To boost the representation learning, different teacher graphs are fused to provide the supervise signal for optimizing student networks. GCMT fuses similarity relationships predicted by different teacher networks as supervision and effectively optimizes student networks with more sample relationships involved. Experiments on three datasets, i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMCreID, and MSMT17, show that proposed GCMT outperforms state-of-the-art methods by clear margin. Specially, GCMT even outperforms the previous method that uses a deeper backbone. Experimental results also show that GCMT can effectively boost the performance with multiple teacher and student networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/liu-xb/GCMT .

Graph Consistency based Mean-Teaching for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification

Recent works show that mean-teaching is an effective framework for unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification. However, existing methods perform contrastive learning on selected samples between teacher and student networks, which is sensitive to noises in pseudo labels and neglects the relationship among most samples. Moreover, these methods are not effective in cooperation of different teacher networks. To handle these issues, this paper proposes a Graph Consistency based Mean-Teaching (GCMT) method with constructing the Graph Consistency Constraint (GCC) between teacher and student networks. Specifically, given unlabeled training images, we apply teacher networks to extract corresponding features and further construct a teacher graph for each teacher network to describe the similarity relationships among training images. To boost the representation learning, different teacher graphs are fused to provide the supervise signal for optimizing student networks. GCMT fuses similarity relationships predicted by different teacher networks as supervision and effectively optimizes student networks with more sample relationships involved. Experiments on three datasets, i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMCreID, and MSMT17, show that proposed GCMT outperforms state-of-the-art methods by clear margin. Specially, GCMT even outperforms the previous method that uses a deeper backbone. Experimental results also show that GCMT can effectively boost the performance with multiple teacher and student networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/liu-xb/GCMT .

Extremely Low Footprint End-to-End ASR System for Smart Device

Recently, end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition has become popular, since it can integrate the acoustic, pronunciation and language models into a single neural network, as well as outperforms conventional models. Among E2E approaches, attention-based models, $e.g.$ Transformer, have emerged as being superior. The E2E models have opened the door of deployment of ASR on smart device, however it still suffers from large amount model parameters. This work proposes an extremely low footprint E2E ASR system for smart device, to achieve the goal of satisfying resource constraints without sacrificing recognition accuracy. We adopt cross-layer weight sharing to improve parameter-efficiency. We further exploit the model compression methods including sparsification and quantization, to reduce the memory storage and boost the decoding efficiency on smart device. We have evaluated our approach on the public AISHELL-1 and AISHELL-2 benchmarks. On the AISHELL-2 task, the proposed method achieves more than 10x compression (model size from 248MB to 24MB) while shuffer from small performance loss (CER from 6.49% to 6.92%).

AAformer: Auto-Aligned Transformer for Person Re-Identification

Transformer is showing its superiority over convolutional architectures in many vision tasks like image classification and object detection. However, the lacking of an explicit alignment mechanism limits its capability in person re-identification (re-ID), in which there are inevitable misalignment issues caused by pose/viewpoints variations, etc. On the other hand, the alignment paradigm of convolutional neural networks does not perform well in Transformer in our experiments. To address this problem, we develop a novel alignment framework for Transformer through adding the learnable vectors of "part tokens" to learn the part representations and integrating the part alignment into the self-attention. A part token only interacts with a subset of patch embeddings and learns to represent this subset. Based on the framework, we design an online Auto-Aligned Transformer (AAformer) to adaptively assign the patch embeddings of the same semantics to the identical part token in the running time. The part tokens can be regarded as the part prototypes, and a fast variant of Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm is employed to cluster the patch embeddings to part tokens online. AAformer can be viewed as a new principled formulation for simultaneously learning both part alignment and part representations. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of part tokens and the superiority of AAformer over various state-of-the-art CNN-based methods. Our codes will be released.