Multi-Scale Temporal Cues Learning for Video Person Re-Identification

Temporal cues embedded in videos provide important clues for person Re-Identification (ReID). To efficiently exploit temporal cues with a compact neural network, this work proposes a novel 3D convolution layer called Multi-scale 3D (M3D) convolution layer. The M3D layer is easy to implement and could be inserted into traditional 2D convolution networks to learn multi-scale temporal cues by end-to-end training. According to its inserted location, the M3D layer has two variants, i.e., local M3D layer and global M3D layer, respectively. The local M3D layer is inserted between 2D convolution layers to learn spatial-temporal cues among adjacent 2D feature maps. The global M3D layer is computed on adjacent frame feature vectors to learn their global temporal relations. The local and global M3D layers hence learn complementary temporal cues. Their combination introduces a fraction of parameters to traditional 2D CNN, but leads to the strong multi-scale temporal feature learning capability. The learned temporal feature is fused with a spatial feature to compose the final spatial-temporal representation for video person ReID. Evaluations on four widely used video person ReID datasets, i.e., MARS, DukeMTMC-VideoReID, PRID2011, and iLIDS-VID demonstrate the substantial advantages of our method over the state-of-the art. For example, it achieves rank1 accuracy of 88.63% on MARS without re-ranking. Our method also achieves a reasonable trade-off between ReID accuracy and model size, e.g., it saves about 40% parameters of I3D CNN.