MFCNet: Mining Features Context Network for RGB–IR Person Re-Identification

RGB–IR cross modality person re-identification (RGB–IR Re-ID) is an important task for video surveillance in poorly illuminated or dark environments. In addition to the common challenge of Re-ID, the large cross-modality variations between RGB and IR images must be considered. The existing RGB–IR Re-ID methods use different network structures to learn the global shared features associated with multi-modalities. However, most global shared feature learning methods are sensitive to background clutter, and contextual feature relationships are not considered among the mined features. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a dual-path attention network architecture MFCNet. SGA (Spatial-Global Attention) module embedded in MFCNet includes spatial attention and global attention branches to mine discriminative features. First, the SGA module proposed in this paper focuses on the key parts of the input image to obtain robust features. Next, the module mines the contextual relationships among features to obtain discriminative features and improve network performance. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the performance of the network architecture proposed in this paper is better than that of state-of-the-art methods under various settings. In the all-search mode of the SYSU and RegDB data sets, the rank-1 accuracy reaches 51.64% and 69.76%, respectively.