Learning Context-Aware Embedding for Person Search

Abstract: Person Search is a relevant task that aims to jointly solve Person Detection and Person Re-identification(re-ID). Though most previous methods focus on learning robust individual features for retrieval, it's still hard to distinguish confusing persons because of illumination, large pose variance, and occlusion. Contextual information is practically available in person search task which benefits searching in terms of reducing confusion. To this end, we present a novel contextual feature head named Attention Context-Aware Embedding(ACAE) which enhances contextual information. ACAE repeatedly reviews the person features within and across images to find similar pedestrian patterns, allowing it to implicitly learn to find possible co-travelers and efficiently model contextual relevant instances' relations. Moreover, we propose Image Memory Bank to improve the training efficiency. Experimentally, ACAE shows extensive promotion when built on different one-step methods. Our overall methods achieve state-of-the-art results compared with previous one-step methods.