Diffusion-based Synthetic Data Generation for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

The performance of models is intricately linked to the abundance of training data. In Visible-Infrared person Re-IDentification (VI-ReID) tasks, collecting and annotating large-scale images of each individual under various cameras and modalities is tedious, time-expensive, costly and must comply with data protection laws, posing a severe challenge in meeting dataset requirements. Current research investigates the generation of synthetic data as an efficient and privacy-ensuring alternative to collecting real data in the field. However, a specific data synthesis technique tailored for VI-ReID models has yet to be explored. In this paper, we present a novel data generation framework, dubbed Diffusion-based VI-ReID data Expansion (DiVE), that automatically obtain massive RGB-IR paired images with identity preserving by decoupling identity and modality to improve the performance of VI-ReID models. Specifically, identity representation is acquired from a set of samples sharing the same ID, whereas the modality of images is learned by fine-tuning the Stable Diffusion (SD) on modality-specific data. DiVE extend the text-driven image synthesis to identity-preserving RGB-IR multimodal image synthesis. This approach significantly reduces data collection and annotation costs by directly incorporating synthetic data into ReID model training. Experiments have demonstrated that VI-ReID models trained on synthetic data produced by DiVE consistently exhibit notable enhancements. In particular, the state-of-the-art method, CAJ, trained with synthetic images, achieves an improvement of about $9\%$ in mAP over the baseline on the LLCM dataset. Code: https://github.com/BorgDiven/DiVE