Learning a generalizable re-identification model from unlabelled data with domain-agnostic expert

• Published in: Visual Intelligence 2024-10, Vol.2 (1), p.1-13, Article 28
• Main Authors: Liu, Fangyi, Ye, Mang, Du, Bo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Science; Domain generalization (DG); Domain-agnostic expert (DaE); Label space inconsistencies; Unlabeled source domains
• ISSN: 2731-9008; 2731-9008
• DOI: 10.1007/s44267-024-00062-x

In response to real-world scenarios, the domain generalization (DG) problem has spurred considerable research in person re-identification (ReID). This challenge arises when the target domain, which is significantly different from the source domains, remains unknown. However, the performance of current DG ReID relies heavily on labor-intensive source domain annotations. Considering the potential of unlabeled data, we investigate unsupervised domain generalization (UDG) in ReID. Our goal is to create a model that can generalize from unlabeled source domains to semantically retrieve images in an unseen target domain. To address this, we propose a new approach that trains a domain-agnostic expert (DaE) for unsupervised domain-generalizable person ReID. This involves independently training multiple experts to account for label space inconsistencies between source domains. At the same time, the DaE captures domain-generalizable information for testing. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this method for learning generalizable features under the UDG setting. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art techniques. We will make our code and models available for public use.