Richer Semantics, Better Alignment: Aligning Visual Features with Explicit and Enriched Semantics for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Abstract

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VIReID) retrieves pedestrian images with the same identity across different modalities. Existing methods learn visual features solely from images, failing to align them into the modality-invariant semantic space. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, termed Richer Semantics, Better Alignment (RSBA), to align visual features with explicit and enriched semantics. Specifically, we first develop an Explicit Semantics-Guided Feature Alignment (ESFA) module, which supplements textual descriptions for cross-modality images and aligns image-text pairs within each modality, alleviating the distribution discrepancy of visual features. We then devise a Consistent Similarity-Guided Indirect Alignment (CSIA) module, which constrains the similarity between intra-modality image-text pairs to be consistent with that between inter-modality text-text pairs, indirectly aligning visual features with cross-modality semantics. Furthermore, we design a Cross-View Semantics Compensation (CVSC) module, which integrates multi-view texts and improves the image-text matching of one-to-one in ESFA and CSIA to one-to-many, further strengthening the alignment of visual features within the semantic space. Extensive experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed RSBA.