Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification Using Privileged Intermediate Information
This work addresses cross-modal matching for surveillance systems, offering a novel training approach to enhance robustness in person re-identification across different camera types.
The paper tackles the problem of visible-infrared person re-identification by introducing an intermediate virtual domain as privileged information during training to bridge the domain shift between RGB and IR modalities, resulting in improved matching accuracy on challenging datasets without test-time overhead.
Visible-infrared person re-identification (ReID) aims to recognize a same person of interest across a network of RGB and IR cameras. Some deep learning (DL) models have directly incorporated both modalities to discriminate persons in a joint representation space. However, this cross-modal ReID problem remains challenging due to the large domain shift in data distributions between RGB and IR modalities. % This paper introduces a novel approach for a creating intermediate virtual domain that acts as bridges between the two main domains (i.e., RGB and IR modalities) during training. This intermediate domain is considered as privileged information (PI) that is unavailable at test time, and allows formulating this cross-modal matching task as a problem in learning under privileged information (LUPI). We devised a new method to generate images between visible and infrared domains that provide additional information to train a deep ReID model through an intermediate domain adaptation. In particular, by employing color-free and multi-step triplet loss objectives during training, our method provides common feature representation spaces that are robust to large visible-infrared domain shifts. % Experimental results on challenging visible-infrared ReID datasets indicate that our proposed approach consistently improves matching accuracy, without any computational overhead at test time. The code is available at: \href{https://github.com/alehdaghi/Cross-Modal-Re-ID-via-LUPI}{https://github.com/alehdaghi/Cross-Modal-Re-ID-via-LUPI}