Pose-Skeleton Guided Cross-Attention Representation Fusion for Occluded Pedestrian Re-Identification

Most methods address occluded pedestrian Re-Identification (Re-ID) by employing external auxiliary models in the feature output stage of the backbone network to locate visible appearance areas. Nevertheless, these approaches suffer from issues such as occlusion information diffusion and imprecise masks generated by external models, indicating the need for further exploration in the decoupling of pedestrian features from occlusion information. In light of these challenges, we propose an innovative algorithm called Pose-Skeleton guided Cross-attention Representation fusion (PSCR) method. Firstly, we introduce the Visible Appearance Region Attention (VARA) model designed to leverage pose information for guiding the backbone network in effectively distinguishing between occlusion information and pedestrian features at the intermediate layer. By employing a suppression strategy, the model is able to effectively suppress occlusion interference and alleviate the diffusion of occlusion information. Next, to achieve precise localization of pedestrian-specific semantic regions, a groundbreaking Skeletal Area Modeling (SAM) is proposed. Leveraging the principles of mathematical modeling and capitalizing on the efficacy of human keypoint confidence, this module generates finely-grained masks for local skeleton regions and extracts an exhaustive set of local features. Lastly, under the constraints imposed by spatial attention masks, a cross-attention mechanism is employed to fuse the features acquired from the previous two steps with local features. This fusion process results in the generation of enhanced local features that seamlessly integrate aligning high-level semantic information. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm exhibits notable performance advancements when compared to existing methodologies.