Cross-Modality Person Re-Identification via Modality Confusion and Center Aggregation

Cross-modality person re-identification is a challenging task due to large cross-modality discrepancy and intra-modality variations. Currently, most existing methods focus on learning modality-specific or modality-shareable features by using the identity supervision or modality label. Different from existing methods, this paper presents a novel Modality Confusion Learning Network (MCLNet). Its basic idea is to confuse two modalities, ensuring that the optimization is explicitly concentrated on the modality-irrelevant perspective. Specifically, MCLNet is designed to learn modality-invariant features by simultaneously minimizing inter-modality discrepancy while maximizing cross-modality similarity among instances in a single framework. Furthermore, an identity-aware marginal center aggregation strategy is introduced to extract the centralization features, while keeping diversity with a marginal constraint. Finally, we design a camera-aware learning scheme to enrich the discriminability. Extensive experiments on SYSU-MM01 and RegDB datasets show that MCLNet outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin. On the large-scale SYSU-MM01 dataset, our model can achieve 65.40% and 61.98% in terms of Rank-1 accuracy and mAP value.