Hierarchical Camera-Aware Contrast Extension for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

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.

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 (ReID) has recently gained significant attention from researchers. ReID matches images of the same person from different camera views in various scenes without any labels. Existing clustering methods primarily rely on a fixed threshold (the maximum distance between sample points and clustering centroids) and overlook the importance of adjusting this threshold during continuous model optimization. This mismatch between clustering thresholds and inter- or intra-class spacing reduces clustering accuracy. To address this issue, this study proposes an Adaptive Clustering and Weighted Regularization Contrastive Learning (ACWRCL) framework for unsupervised person ReID. The ACWRCL framework comprises two main components: (1) the Clustering Threshold Adaptive Adjustment (CTAA) module, and (2) the Weighted Regularization Contrastive Learning (WRCL) module. The CTAA module dynamically adjusts the clustering threshold to align with model optimization, ensuring that the threshold remains within an appropriate range to prevent under- or over-robustness in the clustering model. The WRCL module uses the similarity ratio between the query sample and the clustering centroid relative to the overall similarity of all samples with the same labels as the query sample. This ratio is used as the weight in the loss function to penalize incorrect clustering and improve pseudo-label generation accuracy. Extensive experiments on public ReID datasets—Market-1501, MSMT17, Veri776, CUHK03, and PersonX—demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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 .

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Adaptive Attention-Aware Network for unsupervised person re-identification

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) in remote sensing images (RSIs) has attracted lots of attention because it solely employs image-level labels to drive the model training. Most of the WSOD methods incline to mine salient object as positive instance, and the less salient objects are considered as negative instances, which will cause the problem of missing instances. In addition, the quantity of hard and easy instances is usually imbalanced, consequently, the cumulative loss of a large amount of easy instances dominates the training loss, which limits the upper bound of WSOD performance. To handle the first problem, a complementary detection network (CDN) is proposed, which consists of a complementary multiple instance detection network (CMIDN) and a complementary feature learning (CFL) module. The CDN can capture robust complementary information from two basic multiple instance detection networks (MIDNs) and mine more object instances. To handle the second problem, an instance difficulty evaluation metric named instance difficulty score (IDS) is proposed, which is employed as the weight of each instance in the training loss. Consequently, the hard instances will be assigned larger weights according to the IDS, which can improve the upper bound of WSOD performance. The ablation experiments demonstrate that our method significantly increases the baseline method by large margins, i.e. 23.6% (10.2%) mAP and 32.4% (13.1%) CorLoc gains on the NWPU VHR-10.v2 (DIOR) dataset. Our method obtains 58.1% (26.7%) mAP and 72.4% (47.9%) CorLoc on the NWPU VHR-10.v2 (DIOR) dataset, which achieves better performance compared with seven advanced WSOD methods.

For most unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID), people often adopt unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method. UDA often train on the labeled source dataset and evaluate on the target dataset, which often focuses on learning differences between the source dataset and the target dataset to improve the generalization of the model. Base on these, we explore how to make use of the similarity of samples to conduct a fully unsupervised method which just trains on the unlabeled target dataset. Concretely, we propose a hierarchical clustering-guided re-ID (HCR) method. We use hierarchical clustering to generate pseudo labels and use these pseudo labels as monitors to conduct the training. In order to exclude hard examples and promote the convergence of the model, We use PK sampling in each iteration, which randomly selects a fixed number of samples from each cluster for training. We evaluate our model on Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17. Results show that HCR gets the state-of-the-arts and achieves 55.3% mAP on Market-1501 and 46.8% mAP on DukeMTMC-reID. Our code will be released soon.