Discriminative feature mining with relation regularization for person re-identification

The appearance attribute and pose are two important and complementary features, so integrat-ing them can effectively alleviate the impact of misalignment and occlusion on re-identification. In this paper, we deeply investigate the inner relation between attribute features and the spatial semantic relation between key-point region features of the pose in a person image and propose a person re-identification method based on discriminative feature mining with relation regularization. Firstly, an attribute relation detector based on nonlinear graph convolution is built on mining the inner correlation between attribute features of a person, providing relational attribute features for more effectively distinguishing persons with a similar appearance. Then, we construct a hierarchical pose pyramid to model the multi-grained semantic features of key -point regions of the pose and propose intra-graph and cross-graph node relation information propagation structures to infer the spatial semantic relation between node features within-graph and between-graph. This module is robust to complex pose changes and can suppress noise background redundancy caused by inaccurate key point detection and occlusion. Finally, a refined feature model is proposed to effectively fuse the global appearance feature with the relational attribute and multi-grained pose features, thus providing a more discriminative fusion feature for person re-identification. Many experiments on three large-scale datasets verify the effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method.