A Novel Mix-normalization Method for Generalizable Multi-source Person Re-identification

TL;DR

This paper introduces MixNorm, a novel normalization-based data augmentation method designed to improve the generalization of multi-source person re-identification models to unseen domains, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes MixNorm, combining domain-aware mix-normalization and center regularization, to enhance feature diversity and domain-invariance in person Re-ID models.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks.

Effectively alleviates overfitting to source domains.

Enhances model generalization to unseen domains.

Abstract

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has achieved great success in the supervised scenario. However, it is difficult to directly transfer the supervised model to arbitrary unseen domains due to the model overfitting to the seen source domains. In this paper, we aim to tackle the generalizable multi-source person Re-ID task (i.e., there are multiple available source domains, and the testing domain is unseen during training) from the data augmentation perspective, thus we put forward a novel method, termed MixNorm, which consists of domain-aware mix-normalization (DMN) and domain-ware center regularization (DCR). Different from the conventional data augmentation, the proposed domain-aware mix-normalization to enhance the diversity of features during training from the normalization view of the neural network, which can effectively alleviate the model overfitting to the source domains, so as to boost the generalization capability of the model in the unseen domain. To better learn the domain-invariant model, we further develop the domain-aware center regularization to better map the produced diverse features into the same space. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and show that the proposed method can outperform the state-of-the-art methods. Besides, further analysis also reveals the superiority of the proposed method.