IAUnet: Global Context-Aware Feature Learning for Person Reidentification

Person reidentification (reID) by convolutional neural network (CNN)-based networks has achieved favorable performance in recent years. However, most of existing CNN-based methods do not take full advantage of spatial-temporal context modeling. In fact, the global spatial-temporal context can greatly clarify local distractions to enhance the target feature representation. To comprehensively leverage the spatial-temporal context information, in this work, we present a novel block, interaction-aggregation-update (IAU), for high-performance person reID. First, the spatial-temporal IAU (STIAU) module is introduced. STIAU jointly incorporates two types of contextual interactions into a CNN framework for target feature learning. Here, the spatial interactions learn to compute the contextual dependencies between different body parts of a single frame, while the temporal interactions are used to capture the contextual dependencies between the same body parts across all frames. Furthermore, a channel IAU (CIAU) module is designed to model the semantic contextual interactions between channel features to enhance the feature representation, especially for small-scale visual cues and body parts. Therefore, the IAU block enables the feature to incorporate the globally spatial, temporal, and channel context. It is lightweight, end-to-end trainable, and can be easily plugged into existing CNNs to form IAUnet. The experiments show that IAUnet performs favorably against state of the art on both image and video reID tasks and achieves compelling results on a general object categorization task. The source code is available at https://github.com/blue-blue272/ImgReID-IAnet.