AANet: Attribute Attention Network for Person Re-Identifications

This paper proposes Attribute Attention Network (AANet), a new architecture that integrates person attributes and attribute attention maps into a classification framework to solve the person re-identification (re-ID) problem. Many person re-ID models typically employ semantic cues such as body parts or human pose to improve the re-ID performance. Attribute information, however, is often not utilized. The proposed AANet leverages on a baseline model that uses body parts and integrates the key attribute information in an unified learning framework. The AANet consists of a global person ID task, a part detection task and a crucial attribute detection task. By estimating the class responses of individual attributes and combining them to form the attribute attention map (AAM), a very strong discriminatory representation is constructed. The proposed AANet outperforms the best state-of-the-art method [20] using ResNet-50 by 3.36% in mAP and 3.12% in Rank-1 accuracy on DukeMTMC-reID dataset. On Market1501 dataset, AANet achieves 92.38% mAP and 95.10% Rank-1 accuracy with re-ranking, outperforming [11], another state of the art method using ResNet-152, by 1.42% in mAP and 0.47% in Rank-1 accuracy. In addition, AANet can perform person attribute prediction (e.g., gender hair length, clothing length etc.), and localize the attributes in the query image.