Query-guided End-to-End Person Search
This work addresses the challenge of finding specific individuals in crowded scenes, which is important for surveillance and security applications, and represents an incremental advance by extending existing joint detection and re-identification methods with query guidance.
The paper tackles the problem of person search by jointly optimizing detection and re-identification in an end-to-end framework, leveraging query images to guide the process, and achieves state-of-the-art results on CUHK-SYSU and PRW datasets with significant performance improvements.
Person search has recently gained attention as the novel task of finding a person, provided as a cropped sample, from a gallery of non-cropped images, whereby several other people are also visible. We believe that i. person detection and re-identification should be pursued in a joint optimization framework and that ii. the person search should leverage the query image extensively (e.g. emphasizing unique query patterns). However, so far, no prior art realizes this. We introduce a novel query-guided end-to-end person search network (QEEPS) to address both aspects. We leverage a most recent joint detector and re-identification work, OIM [37]. We extend this with i. a query-guided Siamese squeeze-and-excitation network (QSSE-Net) that uses global context from both the query and gallery images, ii. a query-guided region proposal network (QRPN) to produce query-relevant proposals, and iii. a query-guided similarity subnetwork (QSimNet), to learn a query-guided reidentification score. QEEPS is the first end-to-end query-guided detection and re-id network. On both the most recent CUHK-SYSU [37] and PRW [46] datasets, we outperform the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin.