Occlude Them All: Occlusion-Aware Attention Network for Occluded Person Re-ID

Person Re-Identification (ReID) has achieved remarkable performance along with the deep learning era. However, most approaches carry out ReID only based upon holistic pedestrian regions. In contrast, real-world scenarios involve occluded pedestrians, which provide partial visual appearances and destroy the ReID accuracy. A common strategy is to locate visible body parts by auxiliary model, which however suffers from significant domain gaps and data bias issues. To avoid such problematic models in occluded person ReID, we propose the OcclusionAware Mask Network (OAMN). In particular, we incorporate an attention-guided mask module, which requires guidance from labeled occlusion data. To this end, we propose a novel occlusion augmentation scheme that produces diverse and precisely labeled occlusion for any holistic dataset. The proposed scheme suits real-world scenarios better than existing schemes, which consider only limited types of occlusions. We also offer a novel occlusion unification scheme to tackle ambiguity information at the test phase. The above three components enable existing attention mechanisms to precisely capture body parts regardless of the occlusion. Comprehensive experiments on a variety of person ReID benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of OAMN over state-of-the-arts.

Automated summary

The paper proposes an OcclusionAware Mask Network (OAMN) to address occluded person re-identification problems, which includes an attention-guided mask module requiring labeled occlusion data and a novel occlusion augmentation scheme. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of OAMN over existing techniques on various person re-identification benchmark datasets.