Towards Homogeneous Modality Learning and Multi-Granularity Information Exploration for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is a challenging and essential task that aims to retrieve a set of person images over visible and infrared camera views. In order to mitigate the impact of large modality discrepancy existing in heterogeneous images, previous methods attempt to apply generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate the modality-consisitent data. However, due to severe color variations between the visible domain and infrared domain, the generated fake cross-modality samples often fail to possess good qualities to fill the modality gap between synthesized scenarios and target real ones, which leads to sub-optimal feature representations. In this work, we address the cross-modality matching problem with Aligned Grayscale Modality (AGM), an unified dark-line spectrum that reformulates visible-infrared dual-mode learning as a gray-gray single-mode learning problem. Specifically, we generate the grayscale modality from the homogeneous visible images. Then, we train a style tranfer model to transfer infrared images into homogeneous grayscale images. In this way, the modality discrepancy is remarkably reduced in the image space. In order to reduce the remaining appearance discrepancy, we further introduce a multi-granularity feature extraction network to conduct feature-level alignment. Rather than relying on the global information, we propose to exploit local (head-shoulder) features to assist person Re-ID, which complements each other to form a stronger feature descriptor. Comprehensive experiments implemented on the mainstream evaluation datasets include SYSU-MM01 and RegDB indicate that our method can remarkably enhance cross-modality retrieval performance against the state of the art methods.