Learning the Meta Feature Transformer 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.

Although supervised person re-identification (Re-ID) performance has been significantly improved in recent years, it is still a challenge for unsupervised person Re-Iddue to its absence of labels across disjoint camera views. On the other hand, Re-Idmodels trained on source domain usually offer poor performance when they are tested on target domain due to inter-domain bias e.g. different classes and intra-domain difference e.g camera variance. To overcome this problem, given a labeled source training domain and an unlabeled target training domain, we propose an unsupervised transfer method, Domain-Camera Adaptation model, to generate a pseudo target domain by bridging inter-domain bias and intra-domain difference. The idea is to fill the absence of labels in target domain by transferring labeled images of source domain to target domain across cameras. Then we propose a cross-domain classification loss to extract discriminative representation across domains. The intuition is to think of unsupervised learning as semi-supervised learning in target domain. We evaluate our deep model on Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID and the results show our model outperforms the state-of-art unsupervised Re-ID methods by large margins.

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 .

Person reidentification (Re-ID) matches images of the same person captured in disjoint camera views and at different times. To obtain a reliable similarity measurement between images, manually annotating a large amount of pairwise cross-camera-view person images is deemed necessary. However, this kind of annotation is both costly and impractical for efficiently deploying a Re-ID system to a completely new scenario, a new setting of nonoverlapping camera views between which person images are to be matched. To solve this problem, we consider utilizing other existing person images captured in other scenarios to help the Re-ID system in a target (new) scenario, provided that a few samples are captured under the new scenario. More specifically, we tackle this problem by jointly learning the similarity measurements for Re-ID in different scenarios in an asymmetric way. To model the joint learning, we consider that the Re-ID models share certain component across tasks. A distinct consideration in our multitask modeling is to extract the discriminant shared component that reduces the cross-task data overlap in the shared latent space during the joint learning, so as to enhance the target inter-class separation in the shared latent space. For this purpose, we propose to maximize the cross-task data discrepancy on the shared component during asymmetric multitask learning (MTL), along with maximizing the local inter-class variation and minimizing local intra-class variation on all tasks. We call our proposed method the constrained asymmetric multitask discriminant component analysis (cAMT-DCA). We show that cAMT-DCA can be solved by a simple eigen decomposition with a closed form, getting rid of any iterative learning used in most conventional MTL analyses. The experimental results show that the proposed transfer model gains a clear improvement against the related nontransfer and general multitask person Re-ID models.

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 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 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.

Multi-label learning draws great interests in many real world applications. It is a highly costly task to assign many labels by the oracle for one instance. Meanwhile, it is also hard to build a good model without diagnosing discriminative labels. Can we reduce the label costs and improve the ability to train a good model for multi-label learning simultaneously? Active learning addresses the less training samples problem by querying the most valuable samples to achieve a better performance with little costs. In multi-label active learning, some researches have been done for querying the relevant labels with less training samples or querying all labels without diagnosing the discriminative information. They all cannot effectively handle the outlier labels for the measurement of uncertainty. Since maximum correntropy criterion (MCC) provides a robust analysis for outliers in many machine learning and data mining algorithms, in this paper, we derive a robust multi-label active learning algorithm based on an MCC by merging uncertainty and representativeness, and propose an efficient alternating optimization method to solve it. With MCC, our method can eliminate the influence of outlier labels that are not discriminative to measure the uncertainty. To make further improvement on the ability of information measurement, we merge uncertainty and representativeness with the prediction labels of unknown data. It cannot only enhance the uncertainty but also improve the similarity measurement of multi-label data with labels information. Experiments on benchmark multi-label data sets have shown a superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

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.

Prevalent nighttime person re-identification (ReID) methods typically combine image relighting and ReID networks in a sequential manner. However, their performance (recognition accuracy) is limited by the quality of relighting images and insufficient collaboration between image relighting and ReID tasks. To handle these problems, we propose a novel Collaborative Enhancement Network called CENet, which performs the multilevel feature interactions in a parallel framework, for nighttime person ReID. In particular, the designed parallel structure of CENet can not only avoid the impact of the quality of relighting images on ReID performance, but also allow us to mine the collaborative relations between image relighting and person ReID tasks. To this end, we integrate the multilevel feature interactions in CENet, where we first share the Transformer encoder to build the low-level feature interaction, and then perform the feature distillation that transfers the high-level features from image relighting to ReID, thereby alleviating the severe image degradation issue caused by the nighttime scenario while avoiding the impact of relighting images. In addition, the sizes of existing real-world nighttime person ReID datasets are limited, and large-scale synthetic ones exhibit substantial domain gaps with real-world data. To leverage both small-scale real-world and large-scale synthetic training data, we develop a multi-domain learning algorithm, which alternately utilizes both kinds of data to reduce the inter-domain difference in training procedure. Extensive experiments on two real nighttime datasets, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Night600</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">RGBNT201_rgb</i> , and a synthetic nighttime ReID dataset are conducted to validate the effectiveness of CENet. We release the code and synthetic dataset at: https://github.com/Alexadlu/CENet.

Traditional person re-identification methods are mostly based on supervised state of manually annotated data sets. Although the recognition accuracy is high, the algorithm completely relies on effective annotation information and lacks practicability. Based on the above problems, an unsupervised person re-identification method is proposed, which refines features to guide multi-label distribution sorting learning. Firstly, a single and multi-label classification network structure is constructed to improve the matching accuracy of tags by learning the characteristics of each person and its k nearest neighbor and sharing the same class. Secondly, the refinement feature extraction module is designed and embedded into the original ResNet50 network, and the potential key areas in the person image are adaptively located. While weakening the appearance differences of the features, multi-information mining is carried out to obtain the refined features of the characters and assist the classification network to improve the performance. Thirdly, reliable multi-category labels are screened by punishing the sorting between positive and negative categories of labels in multi-category labels. Finally, the network is supervised by combining multi-label distribution sorting loss and multi-label classification loss. Experiments show that without any annotation information, the recognition accuracy of Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID datasets is 58.4% and 42.3%, respectively, and the mAP of Market-1501 dataset is increased by 12.9%.

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) 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.

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

We consider a special type of multi-label learning where class assignments of training examples are incomplete. As an example, an instance whose true class assignment is (c 1 , c 2 , c 3 ) is only assigned to class c 1 when it is used as a training sample. We refer to this problem as multi-label learning with incomplete class assignment. Incompletely labeled data is frequently encountered when the number of classes is very large (hundreds as in MIR Flickr dataset) or when there is a large ambiguity between classes (e.g., jet vs plane). In both cases, it is difficult for users to provide complete class assignments for objects. We propose a ranking based multi-label learning framework that explicitly addresses the challenge of learning from incompletely labeled data by exploiting the group lasso technique to combine the ranking errors. We present a learning algorithm that is empirically shown to be efficient for solving the related optimization problem. Our empirical study shows that the proposed framework is more effective than the state-of-the-art algorithms for multi-label learning in dealing with incompletely labeled data.