Semi-supervised pedestrian re-identification via a teacher-student model with similarity-preserving generative adversarial networks

This paper describes a pedestrian re-identification algorithm, which was developed by integrating semi-supervised learning and similarity-preserving generative adversarial networks (SPGAN). The pedestrian re-identification task aimed to rapidly capture the same target using different cameras. Importantly, this process can be applied in the field of security. Because real-life environments are complex, the number of detected identities is uncertain, and the cost of manual labeling is high; therefore, it is difficult to apply the re-identification model based on supervised learning in real-life scenarios. To use the existing labeled dataset and a large amount of unlabeled data in the application environment, this report proposes a semi-supervised pedestrian re-identification model, which combines a teacher-student model with SPGAN. SPGAN was used to reduce the difference between the target domain and the source domain by transferring the style of the labeled dataset from the source domain. Additionally, the dataset from the source domain was used after the style transfer to pre-train the model; this enabled the model to adapt more rapidly to the target domain. The teacher-student model and the transformer model were then employed to generate soft pseudo-labels and hard pseudo-labels (via iterative training) and to update the parameters through distillation learning. Thus, it retained the learned features while adapting to the target domain. Experimental results indicated that the maps of the applied method on the Market-to-Duke, Duke-to-Market, Market-to-MSMT, and Duke-to-MSMT domains were 70.2, 79.3, 30.2, and 33.4, respectively.