Exploring Shape Embedding for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification via 2D-3D Correspondences
This addresses the realistic problem of identifying people across clothing changes, which is incremental as it builds on existing cloth-agnostic methods by adding fine-grained shape features.
The paper tackles the problem of cloth-changing person re-identification by proposing a new shape embedding paradigm called Continuous Surface Correspondence Learning (CSCL), which establishes 2D-3D correspondences to align images with 3D body surfaces and integrates shape features with RGB features, resulting in validated effectiveness on benchmarks.
Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification (CC-ReID) is a common and realistic problem since fashion constantly changes over time and people's aesthetic preferences are not set in stone. While most existing cloth-changing ReID methods focus on learning cloth-agnostic identity representations from coarse semantic cues (e.g. silhouettes and part segmentation maps), they neglect the continuous shape distributions at the pixel level. In this paper, we propose Continuous Surface Correspondence Learning (CSCL), a new shape embedding paradigm for cloth-changing ReID. CSCL establishes continuous correspondences between a 2D image plane and a canonical 3D body surface via pixel-to-vertex classification, which naturally aligns a person image to the surface of a 3D human model and simultaneously obtains pixel-wise surface embeddings. We further extract fine-grained shape features from the learned surface embeddings and then integrate them with global RGB features via a carefully designed cross-modality fusion module. The shape embedding paradigm based on 2D-3D correspondences remarkably enhances the model's global understanding of human body shape. To promote the study of ReID under clothing change, we construct 3D Dense Persons (DP3D), which is the first large-scale cloth-changing ReID dataset that provides densely annotated 2D-3D correspondences and a precise 3D mesh for each person image, while containing diverse cloth-changing cases over all four seasons. Experiments on both cloth-changing and cloth-consistent ReID benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method.