Adaptive Clustering and Weighted Regularization Contrastive Learning Framework for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

The challenge of unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) lies in learning discriminative features without true labels. This paper formulates unsupervised person ReID as a multi-label classification task to progressively seek true labels. Our method starts by assigning each person image with a single-class label, then evolves to multi-label classification by leveraging the updated ReID model for label prediction. The label prediction comprises similarity computation and cycle consistency to ensure the quality of predicted labels. To boost the ReID model training efficiency in multi-label classification, we further propose the memory-based multi-label classification loss (MMCL). MMCL works with memory-based non-parametric classifier and integrates multi-label classification and single-label classification in a unified framework. Our label prediction and MMCL work iteratively and substantially boost the ReID performance. Experiments on several large-scale person ReID datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method in unsupervised person ReID. Our method also allows to use labeled person images in other domains. Under this transfer learning setting, our method also achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Existing unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) methods have achieved remarkable performance by adopting an alternate clustering-training manner. However, they still suffer from camera variation, which results in an inconsistent feature space and unreliable pseudo labels that severely degrade the performance. In this paper, we propose a cross-camera self-distillation (CCSD) framework for unsupervised person Re-ID to alleviate the effect of camera variation. Specifically, in the clustering phase, we propose a camera-aware cluster refinement mechanism, which first splits each cluster into multiple clusters according to the camera views, and then refines them into more compact clusters. In the training phase, we first obtain the similarity between the samples and the refined clusters from the same and different cameras, and then transfer the knowledge of similarity distribution from intra-camera to cross-camera. Since the intra-camera similarity is free from camera variation, our knowledge distillation approach is able to learn a more consistent feature space across cameras. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed CCSD against the state-of-the-art approaches on unsupervised person Re-ID.

Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) has better scalability and practicability than supervised Re-ID in the actual deployment. However, it is difficult to learn a discriminative Re-ID model without annotations. To address the above issue, we propose an end-to-end Self-supervised Agent Learning (SAL) algorithm by exploiting a set of agents as a bridge to reduce domain gaps for unsupervised cross-domain person Re- ID. The proposed SAL model enjoys several merits. First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to exploit selfsupervised learning for unsupervised person Re-ID. Second, our model has designed three effective learning mechanisms including supervised label learning in source domain, similarity consistency learning in target domain, and self-supervised learning in cross domain, which can learn domain-invariant yet discriminative representations through the principled lens of agent learning by reducing domain discrepancy adaptively. Extensive experimental results on three standard benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed SAL performs favorably against state-of-the-art unsupervised person Re-ID methods.

Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) targets to learn discriminative representations without annotations. Recently, clustering-based methods have shown promising performance, which utilize clustering to generate identity pseudo labels for model optimization. Large intra-class variance mainly caused by domain discrepancy among cameras could lead to noisy clustering results. However, abundant camera-aware sample pairs relations have not been exploited fully to facilitate learning of features with comprehensive knowledge, so as to tackle this issue. In this paper, we propose hierarchical camera-aware contrast extension (HCACE) for unsupervised person Re-ID. Firstly, cognitive collaboration contrast scheme (CCCS) is introduced to explore hierarchical camera-aware relations at the proxy-level, so as to collaboratively promote model to learn representative knowledge. Secondly, aggregative instance contrast extension scheme (AICES) is proposed to promote the learning of potential fine-grained knowledge by aggregating refined camera-aware inter-instance relations. Especially in AICES, hard negative instance extension (HNIE) is designed to generate extended negative instances, so as to assist the exploration of transitional cross-camera inter-instance relations. Finally, extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate superior performance of proposed HCACE.

Adaptive Attention-Aware Network for unsupervised person re-identification

Person re-identification (ReID) aims at searching the same identity person among images captured by various cameras. Existing fully supervised person ReID methods usually suffer from poor generalization capability caused by domain gaps. Unsupervised person ReID has attracted a lot of attention recently, because it works without intensive manual annotation and thus shows great potential in adapting to new conditions. Representation learning plays a critical role in unsupervised person ReID. In this work, we propose a novel selective contrastive learning framework for fully unsupervised feature learning. Specifically, different from traditional contrastive learning strategies, we propose to use multiple positives and adaptively selected negatives for defining the contrastive loss, enabling to learn a feature embedding model with stronger identity discriminative representation. Moreover, we propose to jointly leverage global and local features to construct three dynamic memory banks, among which the global and local ones are used for pairwise similarity computation and the mixture memory bank are used for contrastive loss definition. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method in unsupervised person ReID compared with the state of the art. Our code is available at https://github.com/pangbo1997/Unsup_ReID.git .

Although unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) has drawn increasing research attention, it still faces the challenge of learning discriminative features in the absence of pairwise labels across disjoint camera views. To tackle the issue of label scarcity, researchers have delved into clustering and multilabel learning using memory dictionaries. Although effective in improving unsupervised Re-ID performance, these methods require substantial computational resources and introduce additional training complexity. To address this issue, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective and learnable module effective block, named the meta feature transformer (MFT). MFT is a streamlined, lightweight network architecture that operates without the need for complex networks or feature memory bank storage. It primarily focuses on learning interactions between sample features within small groups using a transformer mechanism in each mini-batch. It then generates a new sample feature for each group through a weighted sum. The main benefits of MFT arise from two aspects: (1) it allows for the use of numerous new samples for training, which significantly expands the feature space and enhances the network’s generalization capabilities; (2) the trainable attention weights highlight the importance of samples, enabling the network to focus on more useful or distinguishable samples. We validate our method on two popular large-scale Re-ID benchmarks, where extensive evaluations show that our MFT outperforms previous methods and significantly improves Re-ID performances.

Unsupervised person reidentification (Re-ID) is crucial since it enables the matching of individuals without labeled data. Existing clustering-based methods directly discard outlier samples. However, these discarded outliers are not noise samples. In contrast, they are some high-quality samples that are especially meaningful for implementing Re-ID cross-camera retrieval. To capitalize on the diversity of data, we propose a pose-aligned outlier sample relabeling (POSR) model to relabel these outliers to mine diverse data representations for accurate cross-camera retrieval. POSR consists of a pose-aligned feature learning (PFL) module and a biclustering outlier relabeling (BOR) module. The PFL module learns pose features with fine-grained information about human joint points by dynamically matching tokens and obtains the pose-aligned feature via average pooling. The pose-aligned features can compensate for the limitations of global features obtained through the transformer encoder for alignment processing. Therefore, the BOR module is proposed to relabel outlier samples through the complementarity of pose-aligned features and global features, which can learn ID-consistent representations and achieve more robust performance for cross-camera retrieval of unsupervised Re-ID by training meaningful outlier samples. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and significantly improve Re-ID accuracy.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to mitigate the domain shift that occurs when transferring knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. While it has been studied for application in unsupervised person re-identification (ReID), the relations of feature distribution across the source and target domains remain underexplored, as they either ignore the local relations or omit the in-depth consideration of negative transfer when two domains do not share identical label spaces. In light of the above, this paper presents an innovative part-aware progressive adaptation network (PPAN) that exploits global and local relations for UDA-based ReID across domains. A multi-branch network is developed that explicitly learns discriminative feature representation from both whole-body images and body-part images under the supervision of a labeled source domain. Within each network branch, an independent UDA constraint is designed that aligns the global and local feature distributions from a labeled source domain with those of an unlabeled target domain. In addition, a novel progressive adaptation strategy (PAS) is designed that effectively alleviates the negative influence of outlier source identities. The proposed unsupervised ReID model is evaluated on five widely used datasets (Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, CUHK03, VIPeR and PRID), and experimental results demonstrate its superior robustness and effectiveness relative to state-of-the-art approaches.

Instance-aware diversity feature generation for unsupervised person re-identification

As a challenging task, unsupervised person ReID aims to match the same identity with query images which does not require any labeled information. In general, most existing approaches focus on the visual cues only, leaving potentially valuable auxiliary metadata information (e.g., spatio-temporal context) unexplored. In the real world, such metadata is normally available alongside captured images, and thus plays an important role in separating several hard ReID matches. With this motivation in mind, we propose~\textbf{MGH}, a novel unsupervised person ReID approach that uses meta information to construct a hypergraph for feature learning and label refinement. In principle, the hypergraph is composed of camera-topology-aware hyperedges, which can model the heterogeneous data correlations across cameras. Taking advantage of label propagation on the hypergraph, the proposed approach is able to effectively refine the ReID results, such as correcting the wrong labels or smoothing the noisy labels. Given the refined results, We further present a memory-based listwise loss to directly optimize the average precision in an approximate manner. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach against the state-of-the-art.

Debiased hybrid contrastive learning with hard negative mining for unsupervised person re-identification

Unsupervised person reidentification (re-ID) is designed to deal with the problem that in industrial application scenarios, the consistent features of the same person cannot be fully mined due to the lack of annotated information in the collected image resources. Researchers focus on using pseudolabels to label images with the same clustering attributes, but traditional clustering methods are prone to generating noisy pseudolabels, which greatly reduce the accuracy of unsupervised person re-ID. We propose a method to refine pseudolabels by generating discriminative information based on channel partitioning. In the design process, the feature map is divided from the channel level, generating a proximity matrix by calculating the distance between the channel feature and the global feature, and select the most negative sample as the verification label to optimize the pseudolabel of the global feature. As a bidirectional guide, the global pseudolabel can be used to further smooth each channel label, keeping the consistency of channel features and global features in pseudolabel selection. This unique method of learning local features can link global information and channel information. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposal on representative person re-ID datasets.

Many object re-identification (Re-ID) methods that depend on large-scale training datasets have been proposed in recent years. However, the performance of these methods degrades dramatically when insufficient training data are available. To address this challenging problem, we propose a few-shot object re-identification (FSOR) method that enhances the generalization and discrimination abilities of object Re-ID models trained on small datasets. This method applies two novel techniques: reparameterization for feature vectors and dual-distance metric learning. The reparameterization mechanism transforms the primary feature vector of each input image into a Gaussian distribution to enhance the robustness of the FSOR method when performing object Re-ID tasks. The dual-distance metric learning technique, called H&C learning, considers both the hard mining distance and the center-point distance between each query sample and each support set of different object identities. H&C learning extracts the characteristics of the entire training dataset more precisely than other approaches and thus improves the discriminative abilities of object Re-ID models. Extensive experiments on both person and vehicle Re-ID datasets, such as Market-1501, DukeMTMC-ReID, CUHK03, and VeRi-776, show that the FSOR method has improved performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods when the amount of labeled training data is small.

Semi-supervised person re-identification (Re-ID) is an important approach for alleviating annotation costs when learning to match person images across camera views. Most existing works assume that training data contains abundant identities crossing camera views. However, this assumption is not true in many real-world applications, especially when images are captured in nonadjacent scenes for Re-ID in wider areas, where the identities rarely cross camera views. In this work, we operate semi-supervised Re-ID under a relaxed assumption of identities rarely crossing camera views, which is still largely ignored in existing methods. Since the identities rarely cross camera views, the underlying sample relations across camera views become much more uncertain, and deteriorate the noise accumulation problem in many advanced Re-ID methods that apply pseudo labeling for associating visually similar samples. To quantify such uncertainty, we parameterize the probabilistic relations between samples in a relation discovery objective for pseudo label training. Then, we introduce reward quantified by identification performance on a few labeled data to guide learning dynamic relations between samples for reducing uncertainty. Our strategy is called the Rewarded Relation Discovery (R 2 D), of which the rewarded learning paradigm is under-explored in existing pseudo labeling methods. To further reduce the uncertainty in sample relations, we perform multiple relation discovery objectives learning to discover probabilistic relations based on different prior knowledge of intra-camera affinity and cross-camera style variation, and fuse the complementary knowledge of different probabilistic relations by similarity distillation. To better evaluate semi-supervised Re-ID on identities rarely crossing camera views, we collect a new real-world dataset called REID-CBD, and perform simulation on benchmark datasets. Experiment results show that our method outperforms a wide range of semi-supervised and unsupervised learning methods.