Learning Domain Invariant Representations for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Generalizable person Re-Identification (ReID) aims to learn ready-to-use cross-domain representations for direct cross-data evaluation, which has attracted growing attention in the recent computer vision (CV) community. In this work, we construct a structural causal model (SCM) among identity labels, identity-specific factors (clothing/shoes color etc.), and domain-specific factors (background, viewpoints etc.). According to the causal analysis, we propose a novel Domain Invariant Representation Learning for generalizable person Re-Identification (DIR-ReID) framework. Specifically, we propose to disentangle the identity-specific and domain-specific factors into two independent feature spaces, based on which an effective backdoor adjustment approximate implementation is proposed for serving as a causal intervention towards the SCM. Extensive experiments have been conducted, showing that DIR-ReID outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on large-scale domain generalization (DG) ReID benchmarks.