Improving Person Re-identification using A Self-focusing Network in Internet of Things

Person re-identification (re-ID), which is a significant and potential application in Internet of Things (IoT), aims to retrieve pedestrians of interest given a labeled image in a camera network. Now, it is still existing many challenges that severely influence feature representation in practical scenarios. Many methods adopt the attention mechanism in convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve the ability of feature learning. Although they only apply one-dimensional attention block in the popular deep learning architecture, the learned features are not discriminative for the feature representation. In this work, we investigate a self-focusing network (SFNet) that considers both the channel-dimensional attention and spatial-dimensional attention to adaptively learn more discriminative features. Namely, we embed the new attention module into the common backbone network, which can focus on the salient region by inhibiting the redundant features. Specifically, we design eight variants of the channel-dimensional attention and spatial-dimensional attention throughout the entire network and explore the most powerful feature representation. The heatmaps of different layers are visualized to intuitively present the performance of SFNet. Furthermore, we compare SFNet with the prior work on three popular person re-ID benchmarks by abundant experiments.