Towards Grand Unified Representation Learning for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised learning visible-infrared person re-identification (USL-VI-ReID) is an extremely important and challenging task, which can alleviate the issue of expensive cross-modality annotations. Existing works focus on handling the cross-modality discrepancy under unsupervised conditions. However, they ignore the fact that USL-VI-ReID is a cross-modality retrieval task with the hierarchical discrepancy, i.e., camera variation and modality discrepancy, resulting in clustering inconsistencies and ambiguous cross-modality label association. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical framework to learn grand unified representation (GUR) for USL-VI-ReID. The grand unified representation lies in two aspects: 1) GUR adopts a bottom-up domain learning strategy with a cross-memory association embedding module to explore the information of hierarchical domains, i.e., intra-camera, inter-camera, and inter-modality domains, learning a unified and robust representation against hierarchical discrepancy. 2) To unify the identities of the two modalities, we develop a cross-modality label unification module that constructs a cross-modality affinity matrix as a bridge for propagating labels between two modalities. Then, we utilize the homogeneous structure matrix to smooth the propagated labels, ensuring that the label structure within one modality remains unchanged. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our GUR framework significantly outperforms existing USL-VI-ReID methods, and even surpasses some supervised counterparts.