An Effective Data Augmentation for Person Re-identification

In order to make full use of structural information of grayscale images and reduce adverse impact of illumination variation for person re-identification (ReID), an effective data augmentation method is proposed in this paper, which includes Random Grayscale Transformation, Random Grayscale Patch Replacement and their combination. It is discovered that structural information has a significant effect on the ReID model performance, and it is very important complementary to RGB images ReID. During ReID model training, on the one hand, we randomly selected a rectangular area in the RGB image and replace its color with the same rectangular area grayscale in corresponding grayscale image, thus we generate a training image with different grayscale areas; On the other hand, we convert an image into a grayscale image. These two methods will reduce the risk of overfitting the model due to illumination variations and make the model more robust to cross-camera. The experimental results show that our method achieves a performance improvement of up to 3.3%, achieving the highest retrieval accuracy currently on multiple datasets.