Disaggregation Distillation for Person Search

Person search is a challenging task in computer vision and multimedia understanding, which aims at localizing and identifying target individuals in realistic scenes. State-of-the-art models achieve remarkable success but suffer from overloaded computation and inefficient inference, making them impractical in most real-world applications. A promising approach to tackle this dilemma is to compress person search models with knowledge distillation (KD). Previous KD-based person search methods typically distill the knowledge from the re-identification (re-id) branch, completely overlooking the useful knowledge from the detection branch. In addition, we elucidate that the imbalance between person and background regions in feature maps has a negative impact on the distillation process. To this end, we propose a novel KD-based approach, namely Disaggregation Distillation for Person Search (DDPS), which disaggregates the distillation process and feature maps, respectively. Firstly, the distillation process is disaggregated into two task-oriented sub-processes, i.e., detection distillation and re-id distillation, to help the student learn both accurate localization capability and discriminative person embeddings. Secondly, we disaggregate each feature map into person and background regions, and distill these two regions independently to alleviate the imbalance problem. More concretely, three types of distillation modules, i.e., logit distillation (LD), correlation distillation (CD), and disaggregation feature distillation (DFD), are particularly designed to transfer comprehensive information from the teacher to the student. Note that such a simple yet effective distillation scheme can be readily applied to both homogeneous and heterogeneous teacher-student combinations. We conduct extensive experiments on two person search benchmarks, where the results demonstrate that, surprisingly, our DDPS enables the student model to surpass the performance of the corresponding teacher model, even achieving comparable results with general person search models.