Flexible Body Partition-Based Adversarial Learning for Visible Infrared Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to retrieve images of the same person across disjoint camera views. Most Re-ID studies focus on pedestrian images captured by visible cameras, without considering the infrared images obtained in the dark scenarios. Person retrieval between visible and infrared modalities is of great significance to public security. Current methods usually train a model to extract global feature descriptors and obtain discriminative representations for visible infrared person Re-ID (VI-REID). Nevertheless, they ignore the detailed information of heterogeneous pedestrian images, which affects the performance of Re-ID. In this article, we propose a flexible body partition (FBP) model-based adversarial learning method (FBP-AL) for VI-REID. To learn more fine-grained information, FBP model is exploited to automatically distinguish part representations according to the feature maps of pedestrian images. Specially, we design a modality classifier and introduce adversarial learning which attempts to discriminate features between visible and infrared modality. Adaptive weighting-based representation learning and threefold triplet loss-based metric learning compete with modality classification to obtain more effective modality-sharable features, thus shrinking the cross-modality gap and enhancing the feature discriminability. Extensive experimental results on two cross-modality person Re-ID data sets, i.e., SYSU-MM01 and RegDB, exhibit the superiority of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art solutions.