Learning Intra and Inter-Camera Invariance for Isolated Camera Supervised Person Re-identification

Abstract: Supervised person re-identification assumes that a person has images captured under multiple cameras. However when cameras are placed in distance, a person rarely appears in more than one camera. This paper thus studies person re-ID under such isolated camera supervised (ISCS) setting. Instead of trying to generate fake cross-camera features like previous methods, we explore a novel perspective by making efficient use of the variation in training data. Under ISCS setting, a person only has limited images from a single camera, so the camera bias becomes a critical issue confounding ID discrimination. Cross-camera images are prone to being recognized as different IDs simply by camera style. To eliminate the confounding effect of camera bias, we propose to learn both intra- and inter-camera invariance under a unified framework. First, we construct style-consistent environments via clustering, and perform prototypical contrastive learning within each environment. Meanwhile, strongly augmented images are contrasted with original prototypes to enforce intra-camera augmentation invariance. For inter-camera invariance, we further design a much improved variant of multi-camera negative loss that optimizes the distance of multi-level negatives. The resulting model learns to be invariant to both subtle and severe style variation within and cross-camera. On multiple benchmarks, we conduct extensive experiments and validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. Code will be available at https://github.com/Terminator8758/IICI.