Exploring Stronger Transformer Representation Learning for Occluded Person Re-Identification

TL;DR

This paper introduces SSSC-TransReID, a transformer-based person re-identification framework that combines self-supervised contrastive learning with supervised learning, using a novel occlusion simulation strategy to improve feature representation under challenging conditions.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel combined self-supervised and supervised transformer framework with a new occlusion simulation method for improved person re-identification.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets

Achieves higher mean average accuracy (mAP) and Rank-1 accuracy

Effectively handles occlusion and pose variation challenges

Abstract

Due to some complex factors (e.g., occlusion, pose variation and diverse camera perspectives), extracting stronger feature representation in person re-identification remains a challenging task. In this paper, we proposed a novel self-supervision and supervision combining transformer-based person re-identification framework, namely SSSC-TransReID. Different from the general transformer-based person re-identification models, we designed a self-supervised contrastive learning branch, which can enhance the feature representation for person re-identification without negative samples or additional pre-training. In order to train the contrastive learning branch, we also proposed a novel random rectangle mask strategy to simulate the occlusion in real scenes, so as to enhance the feature representation for occlusion. Finally, we utilized the joint-training loss function to integrate the advantages of supervised learning with ID tags and self-supervised contrastive learning without negative samples, which can reinforce the ability of our model to excavate stronger discriminative features, especially for occlusion. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark datasets show our proposed model obtains superior Re-ID performance consistently and outperforms the state-of-the-art ReID methods by large margins on the mean average accuracy (mAP) and Rank-1 accuracy.