Id-Free Person Similarity Learning

Learning a unified person detection and re-identification model is a key component of modern trackers. However, training such models usually relies on the availability of training images / videos that are manually labeled with both person boxes and their identities. In this work, we explore training such a model by only using person box annotations, thus removing the necessity of manually labeling a training dataset with additional person identity annotation as these are expensive to collect. To this end, we present a contrastive learning framework to learn person similarity without using manually labeled identity annotations. First, we apply image-level augmentation to images on public person detection datasets, based on which we learn a strong model for general person detection as well as for short-term person re-identification. To learn a model capable of longer-term re-identification, we leverage the natural appearance evolution of each person in videos to serve as instance-level appearance augmentation in our contrastive loss formulation. Without access to the target dataset or person identity annotation, our model achieves competitive results compared to existing fully-supervised state-of-the-art methods on both person search and person tracking tasks. Our model also shows promising results for saving the annotation cost that is needed to achieve a certain level of performance on the person search task.