DenoiseReID: Denoising Model for Representation Learning of Person Re-Identification

In this paper, we propose a novel Denoising Model for Representation Learning and take Person Re-Identification (ReID) as a benchmark task, named DenoiseReID, to improve feature discriminative with joint feature extraction and denoising. In the deep learning epoch, backbones which consists of cascaded embedding layers (e.g. convolutions or transformers) to progressively extract useful features, becomes popular. We first view each embedding layer in a backbone as a denoising layer, processing the cascaded embedding layers as if we are recursively denoise features step-by-step. This unifies the frameworks of feature extraction and feature denoising, where the former progressively embeds features from low-level to high-level, and the latter recursively denoises features step-by-step. Then we design a novel Feature Extraction and Feature Denoising Fusion Algorithm (FEFDFA) and \textit{theoretically demonstrate} its equivalence before and after fusion. FEFDFA merges parameters of the denoising layers into existing embedding layers, thus making feature denoising computation-free. This is a label-free algorithm to incrementally improve feature also complementary to the label if available. Besides, it enjoys two advantages: 1) it's a computation-free and label-free plugin for incrementally improving ReID features. 2) it is complementary to the label if the label is available. Experimental results on various tasks (large-scale image classification, fine-grained image classification, image retrieval) and backbones (transformers and convolutions) show the scalability and stability of our method. Experimental results on 4 ReID datasets and various of backbones show the stability and impressive improvements. We also extend the proposed method to large-scale (ImageNet) and fine-grained (e.g. CUB200) classification tasks, similar improvements are proven.