Yifei Deng

Yifei Deng, Chenglong Li, Yuyang Zhang et al.

Text-aerial person retrieval aims to identify targets in UAV-captured images from eyewitness descriptions, supporting intelligent transportation and public security applications. Compared to ground-view text--image person retrieval, UAV-captured images often suffer from degraded visual information due to drastic variations in viewing angles and flight altitudes, making semantic alignment with textual descriptions very challenging. To address this issue, we propose a novel Cross-modal Fuzzy Alignment Network, which quantifies the token-level reliability by fuzzy logic to achieve accurate fine-grained alignment and incorporates ground-view images as a bridge agent to further mitigate the gap between aerial images and text descriptions, for text--aerial person retrieval. In particular, we design the Fuzzy Token Alignment module that employs the fuzzy membership function to dynamically model token-level association strength and suppress the influence of unobservable or noisy tokens. It can alleviate the semantic inconsistencies caused by missing visual cues and significantly enhance the robustness of token-level semantic alignment. Moreover, to further mitigate the gap between aerial images and text descriptions, we design a Context-Aware Dynamic Alignment module to incorporate the ground-view agent as a bridge in text--aerial alignment and adaptively combine direct alignment and agent-assisted alignment to improve the robustness. In addition, we construct a large-scale benchmark dataset called AERI-PEDES by using a chain-of-thought to decompose text generation into attribute parsing, initial captioning, and refinement, thus boosting textual accuracy and semantic consistency. Experiments on AERI-PEDES and TBAPR demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Yifei Deng, Chenglong Li, Zhenyu Chen et al.

The performance of traditional text-image person retrieval task is easily affected by lighting variations due to imaging limitations of visible spectrum sensors. In recent years, cross-modal information fusion has emerged as an effective strategy to enhance retrieval robustness. By integrating complementary information from different spectral modalities, it becomes possible to achieve more stable person recognition and matching under complex real-world conditions. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel task: Text-RGBT Person Retrieval, which incorporates cross-spectrum information fusion by combining the complementary cues from visible and thermal modalities for robust person retrieval in challenging environments. The key challenge of Text-RGBT person retrieval lies in aligning text with multi-modal visual features. However, the inherent heterogeneity between visible and thermal modalities may interfere with the alignment between vision and language. To handle this problem, we propose a Decoupled Cross-modal Alignment network (DCAlign), which sufficiently mines the relationships between modality-specific and modality-collaborative visual with the text, for Text-RGBT person retrieval. To promote the research and development of this field, we create a high-quality Text-RGBT person retrieval dataset, RGBT-PEDES. RGBT-PEDES contains 1,822 identities from different age groups and genders with 4,723 pairs of calibrated RGB and T images, and covers high-diverse scenes from both daytime and nighttime with a various of challenges such as occlusion, weak alignment and adverse lighting conditions. Additionally, we carefully annotate 7,987 fine-grained textual descriptions for all RGBT person image pairs. Extensive experiments on RGBT-PEDES demonstrate that our method outperforms existing text-image person retrieval methods.