Combining Attention Mechanism and Local-Global Features Association Network for Vehicle Re-identification

Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) aims to retrieve the target vehicle from a large dataset composed of vehicle images captured by multiple cameras. Most vehicles are difficult to recognize in the environment of low resolution, occlusion, and viewpoint change, which brings challenges to vehicle Re-ID. Existing work usually uses additional attribute information to distinguish different vehicles, such as color, viewpoint, and model. However, this requires expensive manual annotation. Therefore, we propose a three-branch network based on attention mechanism and local-global feature association (AM-LGFA) to improve the accuracy of vehicle Re-ID. In the global branch, the global features of the vehicle are extracted. A multi-scale channel attention module is introduced into the attention branch to suppress irrelevant information and extract important channel features. The features extracted from the backbone are divided into different stripe features in the horizontal direction in the local branch. Then connect each stripe feature with the global information to enhance the context between features. Finally, the features extracted from the three branches are concatenated as the feature representation of the test phase. The experimental results show that the features extracted by the AM-LGFA network are complementary. The effectiveness of this method is verified on two challenging public datasets, VehicleID and VeRi-776.