Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Vehicle Reidentification

Reidentification (Re-id) of vehicles in a multicamera system is an essential process for traffic control automation. Previously, there have been efforts to reidentify vehicles based on shots of images with identity (id) labels, where the model training relies on the quality and quantity of the labels. However, labeling vehicle ids is a labor-intensive procedure. Instead of relying on expensive labels, we propose to exploit camera and tracklet ids that are automatically obtainable during a Re-id dataset construction. In this article, we present weakly supervised contrastive learning (WSCL) and domain adaptation (DA) techniques using camera and tracklet ids for unsupervised vehicle Re-id. We define each camera id as a subdomain and tracklet id as a label of a vehicle within each subdomain, i.e., weak label in the Re-id scenario. Within each subdomain, contrastive learning using tracklet ids is applied to learn a representation of vehicles. Then, DA is performed to match vehicle ids across the subdomains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for unsupervised vehicle Re-id using various benchmarks. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the recent state-of-the-art unsupervised Re-id methods. The source code is publicly available on https://github.com/andreYoo/WSCL_VeReid.