Enhancing Zero-Shot Pedestrian Attribute Recognition with Synthetic Data Generation: A Comparative Study with Image-To-Image Diffusion Models

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) involves identifying various human attributes from images with applications in intelligent monitoring systems. The scarcity of large-scale annotated datasets hinders the generalization of PAR models, specially in complex scenarios involving occlusions, varying poses, and diverse environments. Recent advances in diffusion models have shown promise for generating diverse and realistic synthetic images, allowing to expand the size and variability of training data. However, the potential of diffusion-based data expansion for generating PAR-like images remains underexplored. Such expansion may enhance the robustness and adaptability of PAR models in real-world scenarios. This paper investigates the effectiveness of diffusion models in generating synthetic pedestrian images tailored to PAR tasks. We identify key parameters of img2img diffusion-based data expansion —including text prompts, image properties, and the latest enhancements in diffusion-based data augmentation—and examine their impact on the quality of generated images for PAR. Furthermore, we employ the best-performing expansion approach to generate synthetic images for training PAR models, by enriching the zero-shot datasets. Experimental results show that prompt alignment and image properties are critical factors in image generation, with optimal selection leading to a 4.5% improvement in PAR recognition performance.