Person Re-Identification Using Heterogeneous Local Graph Attention Networks

Recently, some methods have focused on learning local relation among parts of pedestrian images for person re-identification (Re-ID), as it offers powerful representation capabilities. However, they only provide the intra-local relation among parts within single pedestrian image and ignore the inter-local relation among parts from different images, which results in incomplete local relation information. In this paper, we propose a novel deep graph model named Heterogeneous Local Graph Attention Networks (HLGAT) to model the inter-local relation and the intra-local relation in the completed local graph, simultaneously. Specifically, we first construct the completed local graph using local features, and we resort to the attention mechanism to aggregate the local features in the learning process of inter-local relation and intra-local relation so as to emphasize the importance of different local features. As for the inter-local relation, we propose the attention regularization loss to constrain the attention weights based on the identities of local features in order to describe the inter-local relation accurately. As for the intra-local relation, we propose to inject the contextual information into the attention weights to consider structure information. Extensive experiments on Market-1501, CUHK03, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17 demonstrate that the proposed HLGAT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.