Unsupervised Person Re-Identification With Stochastic Training Strategy

作者：Tianyang Liu, Yutian Lin, Bo Du · 发表于：IEEE Transactions on Image Processing · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1109/tip.2022.3181811 · 被引用次数：52 · 研究领域：Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods、Human Pose and Action Recognition、Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques

Unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID) has attracted increasing research interests because of its scalability and possibility for real-world applications. State-of-the-art unsupervised re-ID methods usually follow a clustering-based strategy, which generates pseudo labels by clustering and maintains a memory to store instance features and represent the centroid of the clusters for contrastive learning. This approach suffers two problems. First, the centroid generated by unsupervised learning may not be a perfect prototype. Forcing images to get closer to the centroid emphasizes the result of clustering, which could accumulate clustering errors during iterations. Second, previous instance memory based methods utilize features updated at different training iterations to represent one centroid, these features are inconsistent due to the change of encoder. To this end, we propose an unsupervised re-ID approach with a stochastic learning strategy. Specifically, we adopt a stochastic updated memory, where a random instance from a cluster is used to update the cluster-level memory for contrastive learning. In this way, the relationship between randomly selected pair of images are learned to avoid the training bias caused by unreliable pseudo labels. By picking a sole last seen sample to directly update each cluster center, the stochastic memory is also always up-to-date for classifying to keep the consistency. Besides, to relieve the issue of camera variance, a unified distan...