Masked Attribute Description Embedding for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification

Cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to match persons who change clothes over long periods. The key challenge in CC-ReID is to extract cloth-irrelated features, such as face, hairstyle, body shape, and gait. Current research mainly focuses on modeling body shape using multi-modal biological features (such as silhouettes and sketches). However, it does not fully leverage the personal description information hidden in the original RGB image. Considering that there are certain attribute descriptions that remain unchanged after the changing of cloth, we propose a Masked Attribute Description Embedding (MADE) method that unifies personal visual appearance and attribute description for CC-ReID. Specifically, handling variable cloth-sensitive information, such as color and type, is challenging for effective modeling. To address this, we mask the clothes type and color information (upper body type, upper body color, lower body type, and lower body color) in the personal attribute description extracted through an attribute detection model. The masked attribute description is then connected and embedded into Transformer blocks at various levels, fusing it with the low-level to high-level features of the image. This approach compels the model to discard cloth information. Experiments are conducted on several CC-ReID benchmarks, including PRCC, LTCC, Celeb-reID-light, and LaST. Results demonstrate that MADE effectively utilizes attribute description, enhancing cloth-changing person re-identification performance, and compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods.