Unsupervised Vehicle Re-Identification Based on Cross-Style Semi-Supervised Pre-Training and Feature Cross-Division

Vehicle Re-Identification (Re-ID) based on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) has shown promising performance. However, two main issues still exist: (1) existing methods that use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for domain gap alleviation combine supervised learning with hard labels of the source domain, resulting in a mismatch between style transfer data and hard labels; (2) pseudo label assignment in the fine-tuning stage is solely determined by similarity measures of global features using clustering algorithms, leading to inevitable label noise in generated pseudo labels. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes an unsupervised vehicle re-identification framework based on cross-style semi-supervised pre-training and feature cross-division. The framework consists of two parts: cross-style semi-supervised pre-training (CSP) and feature cross-division (FCD) for model fine-tuning. The CSP module generates style transfer data containing source domain content and target domain style using a style transfer network, and then pre-trains the model in a semi-supervised manner using both source domain and style transfer data. A pseudo-label reassignment strategy is designed to generate soft labels assigned to the style transfer data. The FCD module obtains feature partitions through a novel interactive division to reduce the dependence of pseudo-labels on global features, and the final similarity measurement combines the results of partition features and global features. Experimental results on the VehicleID and VeRi-776 datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing unsupervised vehicle re-identification methods. Compared with the last best method on each dataset, the method proposed in this paper improves the mAP by 0.63% and the Rank-1 by 0.73% on the three sub-datasets of VehicleID on average, and it improves mAP by 0.9% and Rank-1 by 1% on VeRi-776 dataset.