Spatial Cascaded Clustering and Weighted Memory for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

TL;DR

This paper introduces SCWM, a novel method for unsupervised person re-identification that improves local context alignment and noise handling through spatial clustering and weighted memory, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes Spatial Cascaded Clustering and Weighted Memory (SCWM) to better align local features and balance hard sample mining with noise suppression in unsupervised person re-ID.

Findings

SCWM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on Market-1501.

Enhanced local context parsing improves re-ID accuracy.

Weighted memory strategies effectively handle hard samples and noise.

Abstract

Recent unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID) methods achieve high performance by leveraging fine-grained local context. These methods are referred to as part-based methods. However, most part-based methods obtain local contexts through horizontal division, which suffer from misalignment due to various human poses. Additionally, the misalignment of semantic information in part features restricts the use of metric learning, thus affecting the effectiveness of part-based methods. The two issues mentioned above result in the under-utilization of part features in part-based methods. We introduce the Spatial Cascaded Clustering and Weighted Memory (SCWM) method to address these challenges. SCWM aims to parse and align more accurate local contexts for different human body parts while allowing the memory module to balance hard example mining and noise suppression. Specifically, we first analyze the foreground omissions and spatial confusions issues in the previous method. Then, we propose foreground and space corrections to enhance the completeness and reasonableness of the human parsing results. Next, we introduce a weighted memory and utilize two weighting strategies. These strategies address hard sample mining for global features and enhance noise resistance for part features, which enables better utilization of both global and part features. Extensive experiments on Market-1501 and MSMT17 validate the proposed method's effectiveness over many state-of-the-art methods.