RGB-Infrared Person Re-identification via Image Modality Conversion

As a cross modality retrieval task, RGB-infrared person re-identification(Re-ID) is an important and challenging task, because of its important role in video surveillance applications and large cross-modality variations between visible and infrared images. Most previous works addressed the problem of cross-modality gap with feature alignment by original feature representation learning straightly. In this paper, different from existing works, we propose a novel network(CE
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L) to tackle the cross-modality gap with feature alignment. CE
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L mainly focuses on adding discriminative information and learning robust features by converting modality between visible and infrared images. Its merits are highlighted in two aspects: 1)Using CycleGAN to convert infrared images into color images can not only increase the recognition characteristics of images, but also allow the network to better learn the two modal image features; 2)Our novel method can serve as data augmentation. Specifically, it can increase data diversity and total data against over-fitting by converting labeled training images to another modal images. Extensive experimental results on two datasets demonstrate superior performance compared to the baseline and the state-of-the-art methods.