Cross-directional consistency network with adaptive layer normalization for multi-spectral vehicle re-identification and a high-quality benchmark

To tackle the challenge of vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) in complex lighting environments and diverse scenes, multi-spectral sources like visible and infrared information are taken into consideration due to their excellent complementary advantages. However, multi-spectral vehicle Re-ID suffers cross-modality discrepancy caused by heterogeneous properties of different modalities as well as a big challenge of the diverse appearance with different views in each identity. Meanwhile, diverse environmental interference leads to heavy sample distributional discrepancy in each modality. In this work, we propose a novel cross-directional consistency network (CCNet) to simultaneously overcome the discrepancies from both modality and sample aspects. In particular, we design a new cross-directional center loss (Lcdc) to pull the modality centers of each identity close to mitigate cross-modality discrepancy, while the sample centers of each identity close to alleviate the sample discrepancy. Such a strategy can generate discriminative multi-spectral feature representations for vehicle Re-ID. In addition, we design an adaptive layer normalization unit (ALNU) to dynamically adjust individual feature distribution to handle distributional discrepancy of intra-modality features for robust learning. To provide a comprehensive evaluation platform, we create a high-quality RGB-NIR-TIR multi-spectral vehicle Re-ID benchmark (MSVR310), including 310 different vehicles from a broad range of viewpoints, time spans and environmental complexities. Comprehensive experiments on both created and public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach comparing to the state-of-the-art methods. The dataset and code will be released for free academic usage at https://github.com/superlollipop123/Cross-directional-Center-Network-and-MSVR310. •A cross-directional consistency network for multi-spectral vehicle re-identification.•A cross-directional center loss to simultaneously pull modality and sample centers.•An adaptive layer normalization to adjust feature distribution in each modality.•A high-quality multi-spectral vehicle re-identification benchmark dataset MSVR310.