Diverse Semantics-Guided Feature Alignment and Decoupling for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification
This work improves person re-identification across visible and infrared modalities, which is important for surveillance and security applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing cross-modality alignment and feature disentanglement methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification by addressing modality discrepancy and style noise, proposing a DSFAD network that aligns and decouples features using textual embeddings, achieving state-of-the-art results on three datasets.
Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification (VI-ReID) is a challenging task due to the large modality discrepancy between visible and infrared images, which complicates the alignment of their features into a suitable common space. Moreover, style noise, such as illumination and color contrast, reduces the identity discriminability and modality invariance of features. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Diverse Semantics-guided Feature Alignment and Decoupling (DSFAD) network to align identity-relevant features from different modalities into a textual embedding space and disentangle identity-irrelevant features within each modality. Specifically, we develop a Diverse Semantics-guided Feature Alignment (DSFA) module, which generates pedestrian descriptions with diverse sentence structures to guide the cross-modality alignment of visual features. Furthermore, to filter out style information, we propose a Semantic Margin-guided Feature Decoupling (SMFD) module, which decomposes visual features into pedestrian-related and style-related components, and then constrains the similarity between the former and the textual embeddings to be at least a margin higher than that between the latter and the textual embeddings. Additionally, to prevent the loss of pedestrian semantics during feature decoupling, we design a Semantic Consistency-guided Feature Restitution (SCFR) module, which further excavates useful information for identification from the style-related features and restores it back into the pedestrian-related features, and then constrains the similarity between the features after restitution and the textual embeddings to be consistent with that between the features before decoupling and the textual embeddings. Extensive experiments on three VI-ReID datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DSFAD.