TransPose Re-ID: transformers for pose invariant person Re-identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a computer vision task that involves recognizing and tracking individuals across multiple non-overlapping cameras or over time within the same camera view. It is particularly important in surveillance systems, where it can help in identifying potential threats or tracking suspects. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used to extract invariant person representation for this challenging task. However, CNNs do not consider global dependencies in their initial layers, causing some vital information to be lost during the convolution process. The development of vision-based transformers has opened up new research avenues for person re-identification. This work proposes a purely transformer-based solution, called TansPose Re-ID, that learns pose-invariant person representations. The proposed system uses a vision transformer baseline and enhances its architecture by introducing multiple streams to learn global and local dependencies as well as pose invariance in person images. The architecture includes a Global Self-Attention Module (GSM) and a Local Self-Attention Module (LSM) that jointly learn global and local patch-based person embeddings. The LSM is further improved by stochastically grouping local patches and aligning them. Additionally, an attention feature learning module (AFLM) is introduced in the LSM to handle pose and viewpoint variations. The proposed method is evaluated on two public Re-ID benchmarks, Market1501 and DukeMTMC-ReID, and demonstrates superior performance compared to existing transformer baselines.