Diverse Co-Saliency Feature Learning for Text-Based Person Retrieval

Text-based Person Retrieval (TPR) plays a pivotal role in video surveillance systems for safeguarding public safety. As a fine-grained retrieval task, TPR faces the significant challenge of precisely capturing highly discriminative features across image and text modalities. Existing methods primarily focus on establishing modality-shared feature spaces to bridge cross-modal discrepancies. However, these methods are prone to disturbances from irrelevant information, such as background noises in the visual modality, and often over-emphasize specific local regions while neglecting the capture of diverse discriminative modal features, thereby limiting the robustness of cross-modal matching. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, termed the Diverse Co-saliency Feature Learning Network (DCFL), which mines the co-saliency information between image and text modalities and enhances the diversity of cross-modal discriminative features while mitigating the interference of noise. Specifically, to construct cross-modal co-saliency features, we devise the Intra-modal Saliency Feature Learning (ISFL) and Cross-modal Saliency Feature Matching (CSFM) modules. ISFL employs a weighted mask mechanism to guide the model in reducing the impact of noise information in both modalities. Complementing ISFL, CSFM establishes consistent relationships between saliency features across modalities, leveraging text descriptions to align pedestrian-relevant visual regions. Furthermore, we propose the Diverse Co-saliency Feature Mining (DCFM) to bolster the diversity of discriminative co-saliency features across both image and text modalities. This module integrates a diversity regularization term, enabling the extraction of varied visual cues and capturing comprehensive features of the target individual. Extensive benchmark experiments demonstrate a substantial superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released publicly.