Discriminative feature learning with consistent attention regularization for person re-identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has undergone a rapid development with the blooming of deep neural network. Most methods are very easily affected by target misalignment and background clutter in the training process. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective feedforward attention network to address the two mentioned problems, in which a novel consistent attention regularizer and an improved triplet loss are designed to learn foreground attentive features for person Re-ID. Specifically, the consistent attention regularizer aims to keep the deduced foreground masks similar from the low-level, mid-level and high-level feature maps. As a result, the network will focus on the foreground regions at the lower layers, which is benefit to learn discriminative features from the foreground regions at the higher layers. Last but not least, the improved triplet loss is introduced to enhance the feature learning capability, which can jointly minimize the intra-class distance and maximize the inter-class distance in each triplet unit. Experimental results on the Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and CUHK03 datasets have shown that our method outperforms most of the state-of-the-art approaches.