VILLS : Video-Image Learning to Learn Semantics for Person Re-Identification

Siyuan Huang, Ram Prabhakar Kathirvel, Yuxiang Guo, Rama Chellappa, Cheng Peng; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 5969-5979

Person Re-identification is a research area with significant real world applications. Despite recent progress existing methods face challenges in robust re-identification in the wild e.g. by focusing only on a particular modality and on unreliable patterns such as clothing. A generalized method is highly desired but remains elusive to achieve due to issues such as the trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution and inaccurate feature extraction. We propose VILLS (Video-Image Learning to Learn Semantics) a self-supervised method that jointly learns spatial and temporal features from images and videos. VILLS first designs a local semantic extraction module that adaptively extracts semantically consistent and robust spatial features. Then VILLS designs a unified feature learning and adaptation module to represent image and video modalities in a consistent feature space. By Leveraging self-supervised large-scale pre-training VILLS establishes a new State-of-The-Art that significantly outperforms existing image and video-based methods.