@inproceedings{ce00d6fa8af5457d9fcdb2afd658d219,
title = "CycAs: Self-supervised Cycle Association for Learning Re-identifiable Descriptions",
abstract = "This paper proposes a self-supervised learning method for the person re-identification (re-ID) problem, where existing unsupervised methods usually rely on pseudo labels, such as those from video tracklets or clustering. A potential drawback of using pseudo labels is that errors may accumulate and it is challenging to estimate the number of pseudo IDs. We introduce a different unsupervised method that allows us to learn pedestrian embeddings from raw videos, without resorting to pseudo labels. The goal is to construct a self-supervised pretext task that matches the person re-ID objective. Inspired by the data association concept in multi-object tracking, we propose the Cycle Association (CycAs) task: after performing data association between a pair of video frames forward and then backward, a pedestrian instance is supposed to be associated to itself. To fulfill this goal, the model must learn a meaningful representation that can well describe correspondences between instances in frame pairs. We adapt the discrete association process to a differentiable form, such that end-to-end training becomes feasible. Experiments are conducted in two aspects: We first compare our method with existing unsupervised re-ID methods on seven benchmarks and demonstrate CycAs{\textquoteright} superiority. Then, to further validate the practical value of CycAs in real-world applications, we perform training on self-collected videos and report promising performance on standard test sets.",
keywords = "Cycle consistency, Self-supervised, person re-ID",
author = "Zhongdao Wang and Jingwei Zhang and Liang Zheng and Yixuan Liu and Yifan Sun and Yali Li and Shengjin Wang",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.; 16th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2020 ; Conference date: 23-08-2020 Through 28-08-2020",
year = "2020",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-030-58621-8_5",
language = "English",
isbn = "9783030586201",
series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)",
publisher = "Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH",
pages = "72--88",
editor = "Andrea Vedaldi and Horst Bischof and Thomas Brox and Jan-Michael Frahm",
booktitle = "Computer Vision – ECCV 2020 - 16th European Conference, 2020, Proceedings",
address = "Germany",
}