Apparel-Invariant Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification

With the rise of deep learning methods, person Re-Identification (ReID) performance has been improved tremendously in many public datasets. However, most public ReID datasets are collected in a short time window in which persons’ appearance rarely changes. In real-world applications such as in a shopping mall, the same person may change their wearings, and different persons may wear similar apparel. It reveals a critical problem that current ReID models heavily rely on a person’s apparel, resulting in an inconsistent ReID performance. Therefore, it is crucial to learn an apparel-invariant person representation under clothes changing or several persons wearing similar clothes cases. In this work, we tackle this problem from the viewpoint of invariant feature representation learning. The main contributions of this work are as follows. (1) We propose the semi-supervised Apparel-invariant Feature Learning (AIFL) framework to learn an apparel-invariant pedestrian representation using images of the same person wearing different clothes. (2) To obtain images of the same person wearing different clothes, we propose an unsupervised apparel-simulation GAN (AS-GAN) to synthesize cloth-changing images according to the target cloth embedding. It is worth noting that the images used in ReID tasks were cropped from real-world low-quality CCTV videos, making it more challenging to synthesize cloth-changing images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal can improve the ReID performance of the baseline models.