Swap Path Network for Robust Person Search Pre-Training

Lucas Jaffe, Avideh Zakhor; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 9273-9283

In person search we detect and rank matches to a query person image within a set of gallery scenes. Most person search models make use of a feature extraction backbone followed by separate heads for detection and re-identification. While pre-training methods for vision backbones are well-established pre-training additional modules for the person search task has not been previously examined. In this work we present the first framework for end-to-end person search pre-training. Our framework splits person search into object-centric and query-centric methodologies and we show that the query-centric framing is robust to label noise and trainable using only weakly-labeled person bounding boxes. Further we provide a novel model dubbed Swap Path Net (SPNet) which implements both query-centric and object-centric training objectives and can swap between the two while using the same weights. Using SPNet we show that query-centric pre-training followed by object-centric fine-tuning achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard PRW and CUHK-SYSU person search benchmarks with 96.4% mAP on CUHK-SYSU and 61.2% mAP on PRW. In addition we show that our method is more effective efficient and robust for person search pre-training than recent backbone-only pre-training alternatives.