An Image–Text Dual-Channel Union Network for Person Re-Identification

Multiple people can have similar appearances and portions of images can be occluded or have viewpoint changes in real scenarios, causing the increased difficulty of person re-identification (Re-ID). To address these problems, we propose a dual-channel person Re-ID algorithm that integrates person Re-ID image–text pairs into the classification network for end-to-end learning. We construct an image channel and a text channel, and subsequently extract visual information and text information using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a simple recurrent units (SRUs) network, respectively. The text information is used to assist in the learning of visual information, consequently improving the robustness of the visual information. In addition, the visual features are divided into two branches to calculate the global and local features. Global features focus on the overall appearance of a person, whereas local features provide more fine-grained detail. Text information is more accurate and reliable, and it is thus more robust to occlusion and viewpoint changes. Visual information complemented by text information can describe a person more accurately and reliably. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.