TAGPerson: A Target-Aware Generation Pipeline for Person Re-identification

Nowadays, real data in person re-identification (ReID) task is facing privacy issues, e.g., the banned dataset DukeMTMC-ReID. Thus it becomes much harder to collect real data for ReID task. Meanwhile, the labor cost of labeling ReID data is still very high and further hinders the development of the ReID research. Therefore, many methods turn to generate synthetic images for ReID algorithms as alternatives instead of real images. However, there is an inevitable domain gap between synthetic and real images. In previous methods, the generation process is based on virtual scenes, and their synthetic training data can not be changed according to different target real scenes automatically. To handle this problem, we propose a novel Target-Aware Generation pipeline to produce synthetic person images, called TAGPerson. Specifically, it involves a parameterized rendering method, where the parameters are controllable and can be adjusted according to the target scenes. In TAGPerson, we extract information from target scenes and use them to control our parameterized rendering process to generate target-aware synthetic images, which would hold a smaller gap to the real images in the specific target domain. In our experiments, our target-aware synthetic images can achieve a much higher performance than the generalized synthetic images on MSMT17, i.e. 47.5% vs. 40.9% for rank-1 accuracy. We will release this toolkit for the ReID community to generate synthetic images at any desired taste. The code is available at: https://github.com/tagperson/tagperson-blender