Learning a Semantically Discriminative Joint Space for Attribute Based Person Re-identification

While attributes have been widely used for person re-identification (Re-ID) that matches the same person images across disjoint camera views, they are used either as extra features or for performing multi-task learning to assist the image-image person matching task. However, how to find a set of person images according to a given attribute description, which is very practical in many surveillance applications, remains a rarely investigated cross-modal matching problem in Person Re-ID. In this work, we present this challenge and employ adversarial learning to formulate the attribute-image cross-modal person Re-ID model. By imposing the regularization on the semantic consistency constraint across modalities, the adversarial learning enables generating image-analogous concepts for query attributes and getting it matched with image in both global level and semantic ID level. We conducted extensive experiments on three attribute datasets and demonstrated that the adversarial modelling is so far the most effective for the attributeimage cross-modal person Re-ID problem.