Syncretic Modality Collaborative Learning for Visible Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible infrared person re-identification (VI-REID) aims to match pedestrian images between the daytime visible and nighttime infrared camera views. The large cross-modality discrepancies have become the bottleneck which limits the performance of VI-REID. Existing methods mainly focus on capturing cross-modality sharable representations by learning an identity classifier. However, the heterogeneous pedestrian images taken by different spectrum cameras differ significantly in image styles, resulting in inferior discriminability of feature representations. To alleviate the above problem, this paper explores the correlation between two modalities and proposes a novel syncretic modality collaborative learning (SMCL) model to bridge the cross-modality gap. A new modality that incorporates features of heterogeneous images is constructed automatically to steer the generation of modality-invariant representations. Challenge enhanced homogeneity learning (CEHL) and auxiliary distributional similarity learning (ADSL) are integrated to project heterogeneous features on a unified space and enlarge the inter-class disparity, thus strengthening the discriminative power. Extensive experiments on two cross-modality benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. Especially, on SYSU-MM01 dataset, our SMCL model achieves 67.39% rank-1 accuracy and 61.78% mAP, surpassing the cutting-edge works by a large margin.