An Attention-driven Two-stage Clustering Method for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

The progressive clustering method and its variants, which iteratively generate pseudo labels for unlabeled data and perform feature learning, have shown great process in unsupervised person re-identification (re-id). However, they have an intrinsic problem of modeling the in-camera variability of images successfully, that is, pedestrian features extracted from the same camera tend to be clustered into the same class. This often results in a non-convergent model in the real world application of clustering based re-id models, leading to degenerated performance. In the present study, we propose an attention-driven two-stage clustering (ADTC) method to solve this problem. Specifically, our method consists of two strategies. Firstly, we use an unsupervised attention kernel to shift the learned features from the image background to the pedestrian foreground, which results in more informative clusters. Secondly, to aid the learning of the attention driven clustering model, we separate the clustering process into two stages. We first use kmeans to generate the centroids of clusters (stage 1) and then apply the k-reciprocal Jaccard distance (KRJD) metric to re-assign data points to each cluster (stage 2). By iteratively learning with the two strategies, the attentive regions are gradually shifted from the background to the foreground and the features become more discriminative. Using two benchmark datasets Market1501 and DukeMTMC, we demonstrate that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches for person re-id.