Instant pose extraction based on mask transformer for occluded person re-identification

Re-Identification (Re-ID) of obscured pedestrians is a daunting task, primarily due to the frequent occlusion caused by various obstacles like buildings, vehicles, and even other pedestrians. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach named Instant Pose Extraction based on Mask Transformer (MTIPE), tailored specifically for occluded person Re-ID. MTIPE consists of several new modules: a Mask Aware Module (MAM) for alignment between the overall prototype and the occluded image; a Multi-headed Attention Constraint Module (MACM) to enrich the feature representation; a Pose Aggregation Module (PAM) to separate useful human information from the occlusion noise; a Feature Matching Module (FMM) in matching non-occluded parts; introduction of learnable local prototypes in the defined local prototype-based transformer decoder; a Pooling Attention Module (PAM) instead of traditional self-attention module to better extract and propagate local contextual information; and Pose Key-points Loss to better match non-occluded body parts. Through comprehensive experimental evaluations and comparisons, MTIPE demonstrates encouraging performance improvements in both occluded and holistic person Re-ID tasks. Its results surpass or at least match those of current state-of-the-art methods in various aspects, highlighting its potential advantages and promising application prospects.