Learning to disentangle scenes for person re-identification

There are many challenging problems in the person re-identification (ReID) task, such as the occlusion and scale variation. Existing works usually tried to solve them by employing a one-branch network. This one-branch net -work needs to be robust to various challenging problems, which makes this network overburdened. This paper proposes to divide-and-conquer the ReID task. For this purpose, we employ several self-supervision operations to simulate different challenging problems and handle each challenging problem using different networks. Con-cretely, we use the random erasing operation and propose a novel random scaling operation to generate new im-ages with controllable characteristics. A general multi-branch network, including one master branch and two servant branches, is introduced to handle different scenes. These branches learn collaboratively and achieve dif-ferent perceptive abilities. In this way, the complex scenes in the ReID task are effectively disentangled, and the burden of each branch is relieved. The results from extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances on three ReID benchmarks and two occluded ReID benchmarks. Ablation study also shows that the proposed scheme and operations significantly improve the performance in various scenes. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.