Exciting-Inhibition Network for Person Reidentification in Internet of Things

Person reidentification (re-ID), which aims at recognizing the pedestrians captured by multiple nonoverlapping cameras, has attracted more interest due to its significant and potential application in the Internet of Things like intelligent visual surveillance. However, person reID is still a challenging problem in the situations of various pose, similar appearances, partial occlusion, etc. To handle these obstacles, in this article, we investigate an innovative exciting-inhibition network (EINet) that is a two-branch network composed of the exciting branch and the inhibition branch. The channel-spatial attention block that recalibrates the relationship between channels and highlights features at different spatial positions is used in the exciting branch. A novel Soft Batch DropBlock that randomly selects a continuous region of the intermediate feature maps at the same location is applied in the inhibition branch to inhibit the trivial by an inhibitive mask and reinforce learning the remaining regions. We integrate the comprehensive features from both branches for evaluation and show the performance of EINet intuitively using the visualization method. Abundant experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance by comparing with the previous methods on three popular person re-ID benchmarks. For example, our method obtains 95.64% Rank-1 and 88.75% mean average precision (mAP) on Market-1501, and 77.00% Rank-1 and 74.51% mAP on CUHK03-Detect in the single query mode, respectively. Index Terms—Channel-spatial attention block (CSAB), exciting-inhibition network (EINet), Internet of Things (IoT), person reidentification (re-ID), soft batch dropblock.