Conditional Feature Learning Based Transformer for Text-Based Person Search

Text-based person search aims at retrieving the target person in an image gallery using a descriptive sentence of that person. The core of this task is to calculate a similarity score between the pedestrian image and description, which requires inferring the complex latent correspondence between image sub-regions and textual phrases at different scales. Transformer is an intuitive way to model the complex alignment by its self-attention mechanism. Most previous Transformer-based methods simply concatenate image region features and text features as input and learn a cross-modal representation in a brute force manner. Such weakly supervised learning approaches fail to explicitly build alignment between image region features and text features, causing an inferior feature distribution. In this paper, we present CFLT, Conditional Feature Learning based Transformer. It maps the sub-regions and phrases into a unified latent space and explicitly aligns them by constructing conditional embeddings where the feature of data from one modality is dynamically adjusted based on the data from the other modality. The output of our CFLT is a set of similarity scores for each sub-region or phrase rather than a cross-modal representation. Furthermore, we propose a simple and effective multi-modal re-ranking method named Re-ranking scheme by Visual Conditional Feature (RVCF). Benefit from the visual conditional feature and better feature distribution in our CFLT, the proposed RVCF achieves significant performance improvement. Experimental results show that our CFLT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 7.03% in terms of top-1 accuracy and 5.01% in terms of top-5 accuracy on the text-based person search dataset.