Local information interaction enhancement network for person re-identification

Abstract

Most of existing local-based person re-identification (re-ID) methods extract powerful feature representations from multiple body regions of a pedestrian. However, local-based person re-ID methods employ horizontal or grid slicing to divide pedestrian images, which can easily cause network redundancy and misalignment of pedestrian body parts. Attention mechanisms have been recently introduced to computer vision tasks to strengthen local salient features and suppress irrelevant features simultaneously. However, attention mechanisms overemphasize local salient features, which may lead to potential significant information being missed. To address the above issues, we proposed a local information interaction enhancement network (LIEN) for person re-ID. The network integrates attention mechanism with local-based strategy to achieve mutually facilitating and complementary effects. Specifically, LIEN was composed of three parts: a backbone network, a dual attention module (DAM), and a local information interaction module (LIM). DAM was used to guide the backbone network to extract the local salient information, and LIM was used to mine the potential significant information that DAM ignored by exploring the correlations between different channel-level local features. With the combination of DAM and LIM, LIEN mined the salient features while obtaining more potential effective features. In particular, the way that it extracts local features, LIEN effectively avoided pedestrian misalignment caused by uniformly dividing pedestrian images. We evaluated the performance of LIEN on public person datasets, and experimental results indicated that LIEN achieved a more advanced performance.