PHA: Patch-Wise High-Frequency Augmentation for Transformer-Based Person Re-Identification

Although recent studies empirically show that injecting Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) into Vision Transformers (ViTs) can improve the performance of person re-identification, the rationale behind it remains elusive. From a frequency perspective, we reveal that ViTs perform worse than CNNs in preserving key high-frequency components (e.g, clothes texture details) since high-frequency components are inevitably diluted by low-frequency ones due to the intrinsic Self-Attention within ViTs. To remedy such inadequacy of the ViT, we propose a Patch-wise High-frequency Augmentation (PHA) method with two core designs. First, to enhance the feature representation ability of high-frequency components, we split patches with high-frequency components by the Discrete Haar Wavelet Transform, then empower the ViT to take the split patches as auxiliary input. Second, to prevent high-frequency components from being diluted by low-frequency ones when taking the entire sequence as input during network optimization, we propose a novel patch-wise contrastive loss. From the view of gradient optimization, it acts as an implicit augmentation to improve the representation ability of key high-frequency components. This benefits the ViT to capture key high-frequency components to extract discriminative person representations. PHA is necessary during training and can be removed during inference, without bringing extra complexity. Extensive experiments on widely-used ReID datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.