Cross-Modality Person Re-Identification Based on Dual-Path Multi-Branch Network

Person re-identification is an important surveillance task of searching and identifying pedestrian across different images or video frames. Despite a significant progress has been made in person re-identification based on RGB image sensors, few work focus on the person re-identification between RGB and infrared images, which is a challenging cross-modality problem and has been widely encountered in a dark environment or at night. In addition to the challenges for the same identity associated with variations in camera viewpoints and person poses, there is a non-negligible shift across different sensor modalities since the visual characteristics from RGB and infrared images are heterogeneous. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end dual-path multi-branch network for RGB-infrared cross-modality person re-identification, which introduces the multi-branch deep network architecture. The experimental results obtained with SYSU-MM01 datasets indicate that the proposed method can successfully transfer descriptive visual characteristic between RGB and infrared sensor modality. It can significantly outperform state-of-the-art conventional methods and convolutional neural network methods.