Meta Pairwise Relationship Distillation for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) is challenging due to the lack of ground-truth labels. Most existing methods rely on pseudo labels estimated via iterative clustering and thus are highly susceptible to performance penalties incurred by the inaccurate estimated number of clusters. Alternatively, we utilize the sample pairs with pairwise pseudo labels to guide the feature learning to avoid the dilemma of determining cluster numbers. In this article, we propose a meta pairwise relationship distillation (MPRD) method that incorporates a graph convolutional network (GCN) to provide high-fidelity pairwise relationships to supervise the model training. A small amount of metadata with very-confidence pairwise relationships and the unlabeled pairs with the provided pseudo pairwise relationships participate in the GCN training. Besides, we introduce a hard sample deduction (HSD) module to timely mine the sample pairs with error-prone pairwise pseudo labels to mitigate the misled optimization by noisy labels. Furthermore, since the features of each positive pair represent the same person, we design a positive pair alignment (PPA) module to reduce the redundant information in each feature, which is achieved by minimizing the difference between each positive pair's feature distributions. Extensive experiments on the Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and MSMT17 datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.