Occluded Person Re-Identification With Single-Scale Global Representations

Cheng Yan, Guansong Pang, Jile Jiao, Xiao Bai, Xuetao Feng, Chunhua Shen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 11875-11884

Occluded person re-identification (ReID) aims at re-identifying occluded pedestrians from occluded or holistic images taken across multiple cameras. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) occluded ReID models rely on some auxiliary modules, including pose estimation, feature pyramid and graph matching modules, to learn multi-scale and/or part-level features to tackle the occlusion challenges. This unfortunately leads to complex ReID models that (i) fail to generalize to challenging occlusions of diverse appearance, shape or size, and (ii) become ineffective in handling non-occluded pedestrians. However, real-world ReID applications typically have highly diverse occlusions and involve a hybrid of occluded and non-occluded pedestrians. To address these two issues, we introduce a novel ReID model that learns discriminative single-scale global-level pedestrian features by enforcing a novel exponentially sensitive yet bounded distance loss on occlusion-based augmented data. We show for the first time that learning single-scale global features without using these auxiliary modules is able to outperform those SOTA multi-scale and/or part-level feature-based models. Further, our simple model can achieve new SOTA performance in both occluded and non-occluded ReID, as shown by extensive results on three occluded and two general ReID benchmarks. Additionally, we create a large-scale occluded person ReID dataset with both indoor and outdoor occlusions in different scenes, which is significantly larger and contains substantially more diverse occlusions and pedestrian dressings than existing occluded ReID datasets, providing a more faithful occluded ReID benchmark.