Cloth-aware Augmentation for Cloth-generalized Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (ReID) is crucial in video surveillance, aiming to match individuals across different camera views while cloth-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) focuses on pedestrians changing attire. Many existing CC-ReID methods overlook generalization, crucial for universality across cloth-consistent and cloth-changing scenarios. This paper pioneers exploring the cloth-generalized person re-identification (CG-ReID) task and introduces the Cloth-aware Augmentation (CaAug) strategy. Comprising domain augmentation and feature augmentation, CaAug aims to learn identity-relevant features adaptable to both scenarios. Domain augmentation involves creating diverse fictitious domains and simulating various clothing scenarios. Supervising features from different cloth domains enhances robustness and generalization against clothing changes. Additionally, for feature augmentation, element exchange introduces diversity concerning clothing changes. Regularizing the model with these augmented features strengthens resilience against clothing change uncertainty. Extensive experiments on cloth-changing datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods.