Progressive Cross-camera Soft-label Learning for Semi-supervised Person Re-identification

In this paper, we focus on the semi-supervised person re-identification (Re-ID) case, which only has the intra-camera (within-camera) labels but not inter-camera (cross-camera) labels. In real-world applications, these intra-camera labels can be readily captured by tracking algorithms or few manual annotations, when compared with cross-camera labels. In this case, it is very difficult to explore the relationships between cross-camera persons in the training stage due to the lack of cross-camera label information. To deal with this issue, we propose a novel Progressive Cross-camera Soft-label Learning (PCSL) framework for the semi-supervised person Re-ID task, which can generate cross-camera soft-labels and utilize them to optimize the network. Concretely, we calculate an affinity matrix based on person-level features and adapt them to produce the similarities between cross-camera persons (i.e., cross-camera soft-labels). To exploit these soft-labels to train the network, we investigate the weighted cross-entropy loss and the weighted triplet loss from the classification and discrimination perspectives, respectively. Particularly, the proposed framework alternately generates progressive cross-camera soft-labels and gradually improves feature representations in the whole learning course. Extensive experiments on five large-scale benchmark datasets show that PCSL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods that employ labeled source domains or the images generated by the GAN-based models. Furthermore, the proposed method even has a competitive performance with respect to deep supervised Re-ID methods.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT

ICE: Inter-instance Contrastive Encoding for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

Unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) aims at learning discriminative identity features without annotations. Recently, self-supervised contrastive learning has gained increasing attention for its effectiveness in unsupervised representation learning. The main idea of instance contrastive learning is to match a same instance in different augmented views. However, the relationship between different instances of a same identity has not been explored in previous methods, leading to sub-optimal ReID performance. To address this issue, we propose Inter-instance Contrastive Encoding (ICE) that leverages inter-instance pairwise similarity scores to boost previous class-level contrastive ReID methods. We first use pairwise similarity ranking as one-hot hard pseudo labels for hard instance contrast, which aims at reducing intra-class variance. Then, we use similarity scores as soft pseudo labels to enhance the consistency between augmented and original views, which makes our model more robust to augmentation perturbations. Experiments on several large-scale person ReID datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed unsupervised method ICE, which is competitive with even supervised methods

Joint Visual and Temporal Consistency for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised domain adaptive person Re-IDentification (ReID) is challenging because of the large domain gap between source and target domains, as well as the lackage of labeled data on the target domain. This paper tackles this challenge through jointly enforcing visual and temporal consistency in the combination of a local one-hot classification and a global multi-class classification. The local one-hot classification assigns images in a training batch with different person IDs, then adopts a Self-Adaptive Classification (SAC) model to classify them. The global multi-class classification is achieved by predicting labels on the entire unlabeled training set with the Memory-based Temporal-guided Cluster (MTC). MTC predicts multi-class labels by considering both visual similarity and temporal consistency to ensure the quality of label prediction. The two classification models are combined in a unified framework, which effectively leverages the unlabeled data for discriminative feature learning. Experimental results on three large-scale ReID datasets demonstrate the superiority of proposed method in both unsupervised and unsupervised domain adaptive ReID tasks. For example, under unsupervised setting, our method outperforms recent unsupervised domain adaptive methods, which leverage more labels for training