Parts Semantic Segmentation Aware Representation Learning for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification is a typical computer vision problem which aims at matching pedestrians across disjoint camera views. It is challenging due to the misalignment of body parts caused by pose variations, background clutter, detection errors, camera point of view variation, different accessories and occlusion. In this paper, we propose a person re-identification network which fuses global and local features, to deal with part misalignment problem. The network is a four-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) which learns global person appearance and local features of three human body parts respectively. Local patches, including the head, torso and lower body, are segmented by using a U_Net semantic segmentation CNN architecture. All four feature maps are then concatenated and fused to represent a person image. We propose a DropParts method to solve the parts missing problem, with which the local features are weighed according to the number of parts found by semantic segmentation. Since three body parts are well aligned, the approach significantly improves person re-identification. Experiments on the standard benchmark datasets, such as Market1501, CUHK03 and DukeMTMC-reID datasets, show the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline.