HSMR: A Head-Shoulder Mask Aided ResNet to Guide Focus of Re-Identification Implemented on Tour-Guide Robot.

For service robots, person re-identification (ReID) and multi-pedestrian tracking (MPT) are vital to get a person's location and link identities across frames. Though their accuracy keeps improving, most work lacks consideration of the application scenario, haunted by limited space, constrained power supply, and demands of the real-time response during human-robot interaction. Some ReID models learn trivial or unrelated features, inhibiting the downstream tasks. To solve these issues, the efficient and light-weighted Head-Shoulder Mask aided ResNet (HSMR) is proposed. This model applies multi-task learning to enhance the feature extraction performance in the training stage without extra computational load during inference. The auxiliary task fully uses head-shoulder information to guide the network and focuses on the head region, which contains the identity information. In experiments on the Tour-Guide Robot Data Base (TGRDB), HSMR earned results better than ResNet-18 on the ReID task and was superior to the recent two-stream method on the MPT task. On the mobile hardware, inference reaches an average of 15.2 FPS, three times faster than the two-stream method. The code is released at https://github.com/ZhYLin99/HSMR.