Spatial Cascaded Clustering and Weighted Memory for Unsupervised Person Re-identification
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in unsupervised person re-identification for surveillance and security applications, offering incremental improvements over existing part-based methods.
The paper tackles misalignment and semantic noise in unsupervised person re-identification by proposing the SCWM method, which improves local context parsing and balances hard example mining with noise suppression, achieving state-of-the-art results on datasets like Market-1501 and MSMT17.
Recent unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID) methods achieve high performance by leveraging fine-grained local context. These methods are referred to as part-based methods. However, most part-based methods obtain local contexts through horizontal division, which suffer from misalignment due to various human poses. Additionally, the misalignment of semantic information in part features restricts the use of metric learning, thus affecting the effectiveness of part-based methods. The two issues mentioned above result in the under-utilization of part features in part-based methods. We introduce the Spatial Cascaded Clustering and Weighted Memory (SCWM) method to address these challenges. SCWM aims to parse and align more accurate local contexts for different human body parts while allowing the memory module to balance hard example mining and noise suppression. Specifically, we first analyze the foreground omissions and spatial confusions issues in the previous method. Then, we propose foreground and space corrections to enhance the completeness and reasonableness of the human parsing results. Next, we introduce a weighted memory and utilize two weighting strategies. These strategies address hard sample mining for global features and enhance noise resistance for part features, which enables better utilization of both global and part features. Extensive experiments on Market-1501 and MSMT17 validate the proposed method's effectiveness over many state-of-the-art methods.