IEEE Trans Image Process. 2021 Mar 2;PP. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2021.3060909. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
Existing part-aware person re-identification methods typically employ two separate steps: namely, body part detection and part-level feature extraction. However, part detection introduces an additional computational cost and is inherently challenging for low-quality images. Accordingly, in this work, we propose a simple framework named Batch Coherence-Driven Network (BCD-Net) that bypasses body part detection during both the training and testing phases while still learning semantically aligned part features. Our key observation is that the statistics in a batch of images are stable, and therefore that batch-level constraints are robust. First, we introduce a batch coherence-guided channel attention (BCCA) module that highlights the relevant channels for each respective part from the output of a deep backbone model. We investigate channel-part correspondence using a batch of training images, then impose a novel batch-level supervision signal that helps BCCA to identify part-relevant channels. Second, the mean position of a body part is robust and consequently coherent between batches throughout the training process. Accordingly, we introduce a pair of regularization terms based on the semantic consistency between batches. The first term regularizes the high responses of BCD-Net for each part on one batch in order to constrain it within a predefined area, while the second encourages the aggregate of BCD-Net’s responses for all parts covering the entire human body. The above constraints guide BCD-Net to learn diverse, complementary, and semantically aligned part-level features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that BCD-Net consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on four large-scale ReID benchmarks.
PMID:33651691 | DOI:10.1109/TIP.2021.3060909