Cross-level reinforced attention network for person re-identification

Attention mechanism is a simple and effective method to enhance discriminative performance of person re-identification (Re-ID). Most of previous attention-based works have difficulty in eliminating the negative effects of meaningless information. In this paper, a universal module, named Cross-level Reinforced Attention (CLRA), is proposed to alleviate this issue. Firstly, we fuse features of different semantic levels using adaptive weights. The fused features, containing richer spatial and semantic information, can better guide the generation of subsequent attention module. Then, we combine hard and soft attention to improve the ability to extract important information in spatial and channel domains. Through the CLRA, the network can aggregate and propagate more discriminative semantic information. Finally, we integrate the CLRA with Harmonious Attention CNN (HA-CNN) and form a novel Cross-level Reinforced Attention CNN (CLRA-CNN) to optimize person Re-ID. Experiment results on several public benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.