DCR-ReID: Deep Component Reconstruction for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) plays an important role in many areas such as robotics, multimedia and forensics. However, it becomes difficult when considering long-term scenarios, due to changing clothes irregularly for people. Therefore, cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) has attracted more attention recently. CC-ReID aims to identify the same person but with different clothes. Its main challenge is how to disentangle clothes-irrelevant features, such as face, shape, body, etc. Most existing methods force the model to learn clothes-irrelevant features by changing the colour of clothes or reconstructing people dressed in different colours. However, due to the lack of the ground truth for supervision, these methods inevitably introduce noises which spoil the discriminativeness of features and lead to uncontrollable disentanglement. In this paper, we propose a novel disentanglement framework, called Deep Component Reconstruction Re-ID (DCR-ReID), which can disentangle the clothes-irrelevant features and the clothes-relevant features in a controllable manner. Specifically, we propose a Component Reconstruction Disentanglement (CRD) module to disentangle the clothes-irrelevant features and the clothes-relevant features based on the reconstruction of human component regions. In addition, we propose a Deep Assembled Disentanglement (DAD) module, which further improves the discriminativeness of these disentangled features. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmark CC-ReID datasets, LTCC, PRCC, and CCVID, are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DCR-ReID. Empirical studies show that our DCR-ReID achieves the state-of-the-art performance against the other CC-ReID methods. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/DCR-ReID_TCSVT2023 .