Discriminative Identity-Feature Exploring and Differential Aware Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to learn discriminative representations for person retrieval from unlabeled data. Currently, state-of-the-art techniques accomplish this task by using instance contrastive learning, which contrasts the similarities of the instances in different views. However, existing contrastive methods only focus on the positive effects of inter-instance relationships, while neglecting the negative effects of intra-instance redundancy information. This redundancy information can generate invalid or spurious intra-class relationships during the instance contrasting process, which enlarges the intra-class gaps and increases the noisy pseudo-labels. To address this issue, we propose a discriminative identity-feature exploring and differential aware learning (DiDAL) framework to learn more discriminative intra-identity representations. Specifically, the DiDAL extracts intra-instance salient features by synthetic complementary attention, and further explores the discriminative identity features by modeling the relationship among these salient features based on graph neural networks. This strategy aims to reduce the intra-instance redundancy information. Moreover, DiDAL explores hard instances by leveraging the extracted intra-instance salient features, and matches an anchor with multiple hard positive instances to enhance the robustness of the model to noisy pseudo-labels. Extensive experiment results on two widely used person re-identification datasets and a vehicle re-identification dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.