Pose matters: Pose guided graph attention network for person re-identification

Person re-Identification (reID), aiming at retrieving a person across different cameras, has been playing a more and more important role in the construction of smart city and social security. For deep-learning-based reID methods, it has been proved that using local feature together with global feature could help to give robust representation for person retrieval. Human pose information can provide the locations of human skeleton to effectively guide the network to pay more attention to these key areas, and can also help to reduce the noise distractions from background or occlusions. Based on human pose, a Pose Guided Graph Attention (PGGA) network is proposed in this paper, which is a multi-branch architecture consisting of one branch for global feature and two branches for local key-point features. A graph attention convolution layer is carefully designed to re-assign the contribution weight of each extracted local feature by modeling the similarity relations. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on discriminative feature learning. Our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several mainstream evaluation datasets. A plenty of ablation studies and different kinds of comparison experiments are conducted to prove the effectiveness of this work, including the tests on occluded datasets and cross-domain datasets. Moreover, we further design supplementary tests in practical scenario to indicate the advantage of our work in real-word applications.