Instruct-ReID: A Multi-purpose Person Re-identification Task with Instructions

Human intelligence can retrieve any person according to both visual and language descriptions. However the current computer vision community studies specific person re-identification (ReID) tasks in different scenarios separately which limits the applications in the real world. This paper strives to resolve this problem by proposing a new instruct-ReID task that requires the model to retrieve images according to the given image or language instructions. Our instruct-ReID is a more general ReID setting where existing 6 ReID tasks can be viewed as special cases by designing different instructions. We propose a large-scale OmniReID benchmark and an adaptive triplet loss as a baseline method to facilitate research in this new setting. Experimental results show that the proposed multi-purpose ReID model trained on our OmniReID benchmark without finetuning can improve +0.5% +0.6% +7.7% mAP on Market1501 MSMT17 CUHK03 for traditional ReID +6.4% +7.1% +11.2% mAP on PRCC VC-Clothes LTCC for clothes-changing ReID +11.7% mAP on COCAS+ real2 for clothes template based clothes-changing ReID when using only RGB images +24.9% mAP on COCAS+ real2 for our newly defined language-instructed ReID +4.3% on LLCM for visible-infrared ReID +2.6% on CUHK-PEDES for text-to-image ReID. The datasets the model and code are available at https://github.com/hwz-zju/Instruct-ReID.