Discrepant and Multi-instance Proxies for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

Most recent unsupervised person re-identification methods maintain a cluster uni-proxy for contrastive learning. However, due to the intra-class variance and inter-class similarity, the cluster uni-proxy is prone to be biased and confused with similar classes, resulting in the learned features lacking intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in the embedding space. To completely and accurately represent the information contained in a cluster and learn discriminative features, we propose to maintain discrepant cluster proxies and multi-instance proxies for a cluster. Each cluster proxy focuses on representing a part of the information, and several discrepant proxies collaborate to represent the entire cluster completely. As a complement to the overall representation, multi-instance proxies are used to accurately represent the fine-grained information contained in the instances of the cluster. Based on the proposed discrepant cluster proxies, we construct cluster contrastive loss to use the proxies as hard positive samples to pull instances of a cluster closer and reduce intra-class variance. Meanwhile, instance contrastive loss is constructed by global hard negative sample mining in multi-instance proxies to push away the truly indistinguishable classes and decrease inter-class similarity. Extensive experiments on Market-1501 and MSMT17 demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.