Prototype-guided Attention Distillation for Discriminative Person Search

Person search aims to localize a person of interest in a large image gallery captured by multiple, non-overlapping cameras. Prevalent unified methods have suffered from (1) noisy proposals with mis-detection and occlusion, and (2) large appearance variation within a class, which deteriorates the prototype-based metric learning. To address these problems, we introduce a Prototype-guided Attention Distillation, shortly PAD, which exploits a prototype (a typical representation of an identity) as a guidance to the attention module to consistently highlight identity-inherent regions across different poses. To utilize the knowledge encoded in prototypes for matching unseen IDs, PAD conducts attention distillation to guide student Re-ID queries by deeply mimicking attention maps from the prototype query. Additionally, to address large intra-class variation induced by pose or camera views, we extend PAD with multiple part prototypes representing consistent local regions across different instances. Furthermore, we exploit an adaptive momentum strategy for robust attention distillation in PAD to update more distinct prototypes. Extensive experiments conducted on CUHK-SYSU and PRW demonstrate the effectiveness of PAD, showcasing state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, our distilled attention surprisingly highlights distinguished multiple regions for person search.