Multi-Pseudo Regularized Label for Generated Data in Person Re-Identification

Sufficient training data normally is required to train deeply learned models. However, due to the expensive manual process for a labeling large number of images (
i.e.
, annotation), the amount of available training data (
i.e.
, real data) is always limited. To produce more data for training a deep network, generative adversarial network can be used to generate artificial sample data (
i.e.
, generated data). However, the generated data usually does not have annotation labels. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a virtual label called Multi-pseudo Regularized Label (MpRL) and assign it to the generated data. With MpRL, the generated data will be used as the supplementary of real training data to train a deep neural network in a semi-supervised learning fashion. To build the corresponding relationship between the real data and generated data, MpRL assigns each generated data a proper virtual label which reflects the likelihood of the affiliation of the generated data to pre-defined training classes in the real data domain. Unlike the traditional label which usually is a single integral number, the virtual label proposed in this paper is a set of weight-based values each individual of which is a number in (0,1] called multi-pseudo label and reflects the degree of relation between each generated data to every pre-defined class of real data. A comprehensive evaluation is carried out by adopting two state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in our experiments to verify the effectiveness of MpRL. Experiments demonstrate that by assigning MpRL to generated data, we can further improve the person re-ID performance on five re-ID datasets,
i.e.
, Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, CUHK03, VIPeR, and CUHK01. The proposed method obtains +6.29%, +6.30%, +5.58%, +5.84%, and +3.48% improvements in rank-1 accuracy over a strong CNN baseline on the five datasets, respectively, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.