An Attention-Enhanced Network for Person Re-Identification via Appearance–Gait Fusion

The objective of person re-identification (Re-ID) is to recognize a given target pedestrian across different cameras. However, perspective variations, resulting from differences in shooting angles, often significantly impact the accuracy of person Re-ID. To address this issue, this paper presents an attention-enhanced person Re-ID algorithm based on appearance–gait information interaction. Specifically, appearance features and gait features are first extracted from RGB images and gait energy images (GEIs), respectively, using two ResNet-50 networks. Then, a multimodal information exchange module based on the attention mechanism is designed to build a bridge for information exchange between the two modalities during the feature extraction process. This module aims to enhance the feature extraction ability through mutual guidance and reinforcement between the two modalities, thereby improving the model’s effectiveness in integrating the two types of modal information. Subsequently, to further balance the signal-to-noise ratio, importance weight estimation is employed to map perspective information into the importance weights of the two features. Finally, based on the autoencoder structure, the two features are weighted and fused under the guidance of importance weights to generate fused features that are robust to perspective changes. The experimental results on the CASIA-B dataset indicate that, under conditions of viewpoint variation, the method proposed in this paper achieved an average accuracy of 94.9%, which is 1.1% higher than the next best method, and obtained the smallest variance of 4.199, suggesting that the method proposed in this paper is not only more accurate but also more stable.