We introduce AG-VPReID, a challenging large-scale benchmark dataset for aerial-ground video-based person re-identification (ReID), comprising 6,632 identities, 32,321 tracklets, and 9.6 million frames captured from drones (15-120m altitude), CCTV, and wearable cameras. This dataset presents a real-world benchmark to investigate the robustness of Person ReID approaches against the unique challenges of cross-platform aerial-ground settings. To address these challenges, we propose AG-VPReID-Net, an end-to-end framework combining three complementary streams: (1) an Adapted Temporal-Spatial Stream addressing motion pattern inconsistencies and temporal feature learning, (2) a Normalized Appearance Stream using physics-informed techniques to tackle resolution and appearance changes, and (3) a Multi-Scale Attention Stream handling scale variations across drone altitudes. Our approach integrates complementary visual-semantic information from all streams to generate robust, viewpoint-invariant person representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AG-VPReID-Net outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both our new dataset and other existing video-based ReID benchmarks, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability. The relatively lower performance of all state-of-the-art approaches, including our proposed approach, on our new dataset highlights its challenging nature. The AG-VPReID dataset, code and models are available at https://github.com/agvpreid25/AG-VPReID-Net.
In this paper, we construct a large-scale benchmark dataset for Ground-to-Aerial Video-based person Re-Identification, named G2A-VReID, which comprises 185,907 images and 5,576 tracklets, featuring 2,788 distinct identities. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset for video ReID under Ground-to-Aerial scenarios. G2A-VReID dataset has the following characteristics: 1) Drastic view changes; 2) Large number of annotated identities; 3) Rich outdoor scenarios; 4) Huge difference in resolution. Additionally, we propose a new benchmark approach for cross-platform ReID by transforming the cross-platform visual alignment problem into visual-semantic alignment through vision-language model (i.e., CLIP) and applying a parameter-efficient Video Set-Level-Adapter module to adapt image-based foundation model to video ReID tasks, termed VSLA-CLIP. Besides, to further reduce the great discrepancy across the platforms, we also devise the platform-bridge prompts for efficient visual feature alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method on all existing video ReID datasets and our proposed G2A-VReID dataset.
Large-scale language-image pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP) have shown superior performances on many cross-modal retrieval tasks. However, the problem of transferring the knowledge learned from such models to video-based person re-identification (ReID) has barely been explored. In addition, there is a lack of decent text descriptions in current ReID benchmarks. To address these issues, in this work, we propose a novel one-stage text-free CLIP-based learning framework named TF-CLIP for video-based person ReID. More specifically, we extract the identity-specific sequence feature as the CLIP-Memory to replace the text feature. Meanwhile, we design a Sequence-Specific Prompt (SSP) module to update the CLIP-Memory online. To capture temporal information, we further propose a Temporal Memory Diffusion (TMD) module, which consists of two key components: Temporal Memory Construction (TMC) and Memory Diffusion (MD). Technically, TMC allows the frame-level memories in a sequence to communicate with each other, and to extract temporal information based on the relations within the sequence. MD further diffuses the temporal memories to each token in the original features to obtain more robust sequence features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method shows much better results than other state-of-the-art methods on MARS, LS-VID and iLIDS-VID. The code is available at https://github.com/AsuradaYuci/TF-CLIP.
Advanced deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown great success in video-based person Re-Identification (Re-ID). However, they usually focus on the most obvious regions of persons with a limited global representation ability. Recently, it witnesses that Transformers explore the inter-patch relations with global observations for performance improvements. In this work, we take both sides and propose a novel spatial-temporal complementary learning framework named Deeply-Coupled Convolution-Transformer (DCCT) for high-performance video-based person Re-ID. Firstly, we couple CNNs and Transformers to extract two kinds of visual features and experimentally verify their complementarity. Further, in spatial, we propose a Complementary Content Attention (CCA) to take advantages of the coupled structure and guide independent features for spatial complementary learning. In temporal, a Hierarchical Temporal Aggregation (HTA) is proposed to progressively capture the inter-frame dependencies and encode temporal information. Besides, a gated attention is utilized to deliver aggregated temporal information into the CNN and Transformer branches for temporal complementary learning. Finally, we introduce a self-distillation training strategy to transfer the superior spatial-temporal knowledge to backbone networks for higher accuracy and more efficiency. In this way, two kinds of typical features from same videos are integrated mechanically for more informative representations. Extensive experiments on four public Re-ID benchmarks demonstrate that our framework could attain better performances than most state-of-the-art methods.
Person re-ID matches persons across multiple non-overlapping cameras. Despite the increasing deployment of airborne platforms in surveillance, current existing person re-ID benchmarks' focus is on ground-ground matching and very limited efforts on aerial-aerial matching. We propose a new benchmark dataset - AG-ReID, which performs person re-ID matching in a new setting: across aerial and ground cameras. Our dataset contains 21,983 images of 388 identities and 15 soft attributes for each identity. The data was collected by a UAV flying at altitudes between 15 to 45 meters and a ground-based CCTV camera on a university campus. Our dataset presents a novel elevated-viewpoint challenge for person re-ID due to the significant difference in person appearance across these cameras. We propose an explainable algorithm to guide the person re-ID model's training with soft attributes to address this challenge. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method on the aerial-ground person re-ID task. The dataset will be published and the baseline codes will be open-sourced at https://github.com/huynguyen792/AG-ReID to facilitate research in this area.
In this paper, we present the Multi-view Extended Videos with Identities (MEVID) dataset for large-scale, video person re-identification (ReID) in the wild. To our knowledge, MEVID represents the most-varied video person ReID dataset, spanning an extensive indoor and outdoor environment across nine unique dates in a 73-day window, various camera viewpoints, and entity clothing changes. Specifically, we label the identities of 158 unique people wearing 598 outfits taken from 8, 092 tracklets, average length of about 590 frames, seen in 33 camera views from the very large-scale MEVA person activities dataset. While other datasets have more unique identities, MEVID emphasizes a richer set of information about each individual, such as: 4 outfits/identity vs. 2 outfits/identity in CCVID, 33 viewpoints across 17 locations vs. 6 in 5 simulated locations for MTA, and 10 million frames vs. 3 million for LS-VID. Being based on the MEVA video dataset, we also inherit data that is intentionally demographically balanced to the continental United States. To accelerate the annotation process, we developed a semi-automatic annotation framework and GUI that combines state-of-the-art real-time models for object detection, pose estimation, person ReID, and multi-object tracking. We evaluate several state-of-the-art methods on MEVID challenge problems and comprehensively quantify their robustness in terms of changes of outfit, scale, and background location. Our quantitative analysis on the realistic, unique aspects of MEVID shows that there are significant remaining challenges in video person ReID and indicates important directions for future research.
Video-based person re-identification (re-ID) is an important technique in visual surveillance systems which aims to match video snippets of people captured by different cameras. Existing methods are mostly based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), whose building blocks either process local neighbor pixels at a time, or, when 3D convolutions are used to model temporal information, suffer from the misalignment problem caused by person movement. In this paper, we propose to overcome the limitations of normal convolutions with a human-oriented graph method. Specifically, features located at person joint keypoints are extracted and connected as a spatial-temporal graph. These keypoint features are then updated by message passing from their connected nodes with a graph convolutional network (GCN). During training, the GCN can be attached to any CNN-based person re-ID model to assist representation learning on feature maps, whilst it can be dropped after training for better inference speed. Our method brings significant improvements over the CNN-based baseline model on the MARS dataset with generated person keypoints and a newly annotated dataset: PoseTrackReID. It also defines a new state-of-the-art method in terms of top-1 accuracy and mean average precision in comparison to prior works.
Unsupervised video person re-identification (reID) methods usually depend on global-level features. And many supervised reID methods employed local-level features and achieved significant performance improvements. However, applying local-level features to unsupervised methods may introduce an unstable performance. To improve the performance stability for unsupervised video reID, this paper introduces a general scheme fusing part models and unsupervised learning. In this scheme, the global-level feature is divided into equal local-level feature. A local-aware module is employed to explore the poentials of local-level feature for unsupervised learning. A global-aware module is proposed to overcome the disadvantages of local-level features. Features from these two modules are fused to form a robust feature representation for each input image. This feature representation has the advantages of local-level feature without suffering from its disadvantages. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on three benchmarks, including PRID2011, iLIDS-VID, and DukeMTMC-VideoReID, and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of proposed scheme, local-aware module and global-aware module. The code and generated features are available at https://github.com/deropty/uPMnet.
Video-based person re-identification (reID) aims to retrieve person videos with the same identity as a query person across multiple cameras. Spatial and temporal distractors in person videos, such as background clutter and partial occlusions over frames, respectively, make this task much more challenging than image-based person reID. We observe that spatial distractors appear consistently in a particular location, and temporal distractors show several patterns, e.g., partial occlusions occur in the first few frames, where such patterns provide informative cues for predicting which frames to focus on (i.e., temporal attentions). Based on this, we introduce a novel Spatial and Temporal Memory Networks (STMN). The spatial memory stores features for spatial distractors that frequently emerge across video frames, while the temporal memory saves attentions which are optimized for typical temporal patterns in person videos. We leverage the spatial and temporal memories to refine frame-level person representations and to aggregate the refined frame-level features into a sequence-level person representation, respectively, effectively handling spatial and temporal distractors in person videos. We also introduce a memory spread loss preventing our model from addressing particular items only in the memories. Experimental results on standard benchmarks, including MARS, DukeMTMC-VideoReID, and LS-VID, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) aims at matching the video tracklets with cropped video frames for identifying the pedestrians under different cameras. However, there exists severe spatial and temporal misalignment for those cropped tracklets due to the imperfect detection and tracking results generated with obsolete methods. To address this issue, we present a simple re-Detect and Link (DL) module which can effectively reduce those unexpected noise through applying the deep learning-based detection and tracking on the cropped tracklets. Furthermore, we introduce an improved model called Coarse-to-Fine Axial-Attention Network (CF-AAN). Based on the typical Non-local Network, we replace the non-local module with three 1-D position-sensitive axial attentions, in addition to our proposed coarse-to-fine structure. With the developed CF-AAN, compared to the original non-local operation, we can not only significantly reduce the computation cost but also obtain the state-of-the-art performance (91.3% in rank-1 and 86.5% in mAP) on the large-scale MARS dataset. Meanwhile, by simply adopting our DL module for data alignment, to our surprise, several baseline models can achieve better or comparable results with the current state-of-the-arts. Besides, we discover the errors not only for the identity labels of tracklets but also for the evaluation protocol for the test data of MARS. We hope that our work can help the community for the further development of invariant representation without the hassle of the spatial and temporal alignment and dataset noise. The code, corrected labels, evaluation protocol, and the aligned data will be available at https://github.com/jackie840129/CF-AAN.
Video-based person re-identification (re-ID) is an important research topic in computer vision. The key to tackling the challenging task is to exploit both spatial and temporal clues in video sequences. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based framework, namely Multi-Granular Hypergraph (MGH), to pursue better representational capabilities by modeling spatiotemporal dependencies in terms of multiple granularities. Specifically, hypergraphs with different spatial granularities are constructed using various levels of part-based features across the video sequence. In each hypergraph, different temporal granularities are captured by hyperedges that connect a set of graph nodes (i.e., part-based features) across different temporal ranges. Two critical issues (misalignment and occlusion) are explicitly addressed by the proposed hypergraph propagation and feature aggregation schemes. Finally, we further enhance the overall video representation by learning more diversified graph-level representations of multiple granularities based on mutual information minimization. Extensive experiments on three widely adopted benchmarks clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Notably, 90.0% top-1 accuracy on MARS is achieved using MGH, outperforming the state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/daodaofr/hypergraph_reid.
In this paper, we present an efficient spatial-temporal representation for video person re-identification (reID). Firstly, we propose a Bilateral Complementary Network (BiCnet) for spatial complementarity modeling. Specifically, BiCnet contains two branches. Detail Branch processes frames at original resolution to preserve the detailed visual clues, and Context Branch with a down-sampling strategy is employed to capture long-range contexts. On each branch, BiCnet appends multiple parallel and diverse attention modules to discover divergent body parts for consecutive frames, so as to obtain an integral characteristic of target identity. Furthermore, a Temporal Kernel Selection (TKS) block is designed to capture short-term as well as long-term temporal relations by an adaptive mode. TKS can be inserted into BiCnet at any depth to construct BiCnetTKS for spatial-temporal modeling. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks show that BiCnet-TKS outperforms state-of-the-arts with about 50% less computations. The source code is available at https://github.com/ blue-blue272/BiCnet-TKS.
Video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to automatically retrieve video sequences of the same person under non-overlapping cameras. To achieve this goal, it is the key to fully utilize abundant spatial and temporal cues in videos. Existing methods usually focus on the most conspicuous image regions, thus they may easily miss out fine-grained clues due to the person varieties in image sequences. To address above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Global-guided Reciprocal Learning (GRL) framework for video-based person Re-ID. Specifically, we first propose a Global-guided Correlation Estimation (GCE) to generate feature correlation maps of local features and global features, which help to localize the high- and low-correlation regions for identifying the same person. After that, the discriminative features are disentangled into high-correlation features and low-correlation features under the guidance of the global representations. Moreover, a novel Temporal Reciprocal Learning (TRL) mechanism is designed to sequentially enhance the high-correlation semantic information and accumulate the low-correlation sub-critical clues. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public benchmarks. The experimental results indicate that our approach can achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art approaches. The code is released at https://github.com/flysnowtiger/GRL.
This paper proposes a Temporal Complementary Learning Network that extracts complementary features of consecutive video frames for video person re-identification. Firstly, we introduce a Temporal Saliency Erasing (TSE) module including a saliency erasing operation and a series of ordered learners. Specifically, for a specific frame of a video, the saliency erasing operation drives the specific learner to mine new and complementary parts by erasing the parts activated by previous frames. Such that the diverse visual features can be discovered for consecutive frames and finally form an integral characteristic of the target identity. Furthermore, a Temporal Saliency Boosting (TSB) module is designed to propagate the salient information among video frames to enhance the salient feature. It is complementary to TSE by effectively alleviating the information loss caused by the erasing operation of TSE. Extensive experiments show our method performs favorably against state-of-the-arts. The source code is available at https://github.com/blue-blue272/VideoReID-TCLNet.
Due to the imperfect person detection results and posture changes, temporal appearance misalignment is unavoidable in video-based person re-identification (ReID). In this case, 3D convolution may destroy the appearance representation of person video clips, thus it is harmful to ReID. To address this problem, we propose AppearancePreserving 3D Convolution (AP3D), which is composed of two components: an Appearance-Preserving Module (APM) and a 3D convolution kernel. With APM aligning the adjacent feature maps in pixel level, the following 3D convolution can model temporal information on the premise of maintaining the appearance representation quality. It is easy to combine AP3D with existing 3D ConvNets by simply replacing the original 3D convolution kernels with AP3Ds. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AP3D for video-based ReID and the results on three widely used datasets surpass the state-of-the-arts. Code is available at: https://github.com/guxinqian/AP3D.
To achieve robustness in Re-Identification, standard methods leverage tracking information in a Video-To-Video fashion. However, these solutions face a large drop in performance for single image queries (e.g., Image-To-Video setting). Recent works address this severe degradation by transferring temporal information from a Video-based network to an Image-based one. In this work, we devise a training strategy that allows the transfer of a superior knowledge, arising from a set of views depicting the target object. Our proposal - Views Knowledge Distillation (VKD) - pins this visual variety as a supervision signal within a teacher-student framework, where the teacher educates a student who observes fewer views. As a result, the student outperforms not only its teacher but also the current state-of-the-art in Image-To-Video by a wide margin (6.3% mAP on MARS, 8.6% on Duke-Video-ReId and 5% on VeRi-776). A thorough analysis - on Person, Vehicle and Animal Re-ID - investigates the properties of VKD from a qualitatively and quantitatively perspective. Code is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/VKD.
In video-based person re-identification, both the spatial and temporal features are known to provide orthogonal cues to effective representations. Such representations are currently typically obtained by aggregating the frame-level features using max/avg pooling, at different points of the models. However, such operations also decrease the amount of discriminating information available, which is particularly hazardous in case of poor separability between the different classes. To alleviate this problem, this paper introduces a symbolic temporal pooling method, where frame-level features are represented in the distribution valued symbolic form, yielding from fitting an Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function (ECDF) to each feature. Also, considering that the original triplet loss formulation cannot be applied directly to this kind of representations, we introduce a symbolic triplet loss function that infers the similarity between two symbolic objects. Having carried out an extensive empirical evaluation of the proposed solution against the state-of-the-art, in four well known data sets (MARS, iLIDS-VID, PRID2011 and P-DESTRE), the observed results point for consistent improvements in performance over the previous best performing techniques.
Video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) is an important computer vision task. The batch-hard triplet loss frequently used in video-based person Re-ID suffers from the Distance Variance among Different Positives (DVDP) problem. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a new metric learning method called Attribute-aware Identity-hard Triplet Loss (AITL), which reduces the intra-class variation among positive samples via calculating attribute distance. To achieve a complete model of video-based person Re-ID, a multi-task framework with Attribute-driven Spatio-Temporal Attention (ASTA) mechanism is also proposed. Extensive experiments on MARS and DukeMTMC-VID datasets shows that both the AITL and ASTA are very effective. Enhanced by them, even a simple light-weighted video-based person Re-ID baseline can outperform existing state-of-the-art approaches. The codes has been published on https://github.com/yuange250/Video-based-person-ReID-with-Attribute-information.
The ability to identify the same person from multiple camera views without the explicit use of facial recognition is receiving commercial and academic interest. The current status-quo solutions are based on attention neural models. In this paper, we propose Attention and CL loss, which is a hybrid of center and Online Soft Mining (OSM) loss added to the attention loss on top of a temporal attention-based neural network. The proposed loss function applied with bag-of-tricks for training surpasses the state of the art on the common person Re-ID datasets, MARS and PRID 2011. Our source code is publicly available on github.
Recently, the research interest of person re-identification (ReID) has gradually turned to video-based methods, which acquire a person representation by aggregating frame features of an entire video. However, existing video-based ReID methods do not consider the semantic difference brought by the outputs of different network stages, which potentially compromises the information richness of the person features. Furthermore, traditional methods ignore important relationship among frames, which causes information redundancy in fusion along the time axis. To address these issues, we propose a novel general temporal fusion framework to aggregate frame features on both semantic aspect and time aspect. As for the semantic aspect, a multi-stage fusion network is explored to fuse richer frame features at multiple semantic levels, which can effectively reduce the information loss caused by the traditional single-stage fusion. While, for the time axis, the existing intra-frame attention method is improved by adding a novel inter-frame attention module, which effectively reduces the information redundancy in temporal fusion by taking the relationship among frames into consideration. The experimental results show that our approach can effectively improve the video-based re-identification accuracy, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.