Attentive Part-aware Networks for Partial Person Re- identification

Partial person re-identification (re-ID) refers to re-identify a person through occluded images. It suffers from two major challenges, i.e., insufficient training data and incomplete probe image. In this paper, we introduce a part-aware learning method for partial person re-identification. On the one hand, we adopt data augmentation operation to enrich the training data and improve the robustness of the model. On the other hand, we intuitively find that the partial person images usually have fixed percentages of parts, therefore, in partial person re-ID task, the probe image could be cropped from the pictures and divided into several different partial types following fixed ratios. Based on the cropped images, we propose the Cropping Type Consistency (CTC) loss to classify the cropping types of partial images. Moreover, in order to help the network better fit the generated and cropped data, we incorporate the Block Attention Mechanism (BAM) into the framework for attentive learning. To enhance the retrieval performance in the inference stage, we implement cropping on gallery images according to the predicted types of probe partial images. Through calculating feature distances between the partial image and the cropped holistic gallery images, the model can recognize the right person from the gallery. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the partial re- ID benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance.