Attention-disentangled re-ID network for unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for person re-identification (re-ID) aims to bridge the domain gap by transferring knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Recently, pseudo-label-based approaches have become the dominant solution for addressing this issue. However,most pseudo-label-based methods neglect class boundary samples to reduce the influence of false pseudo labels, sacrificing intra-class semantic diversity. Although hard sample memory bank-based approaches can discover relationships between samples and describe intra-class diversity, they are prone to increasing the risks of generating incorrect pseudo labels. Balancing intra-class variety and pseudo-label accuracy in cross-domain person re-ID poses a challenge. In this study, we propose an attention-disentangled re-ID network (ADDNet) to enhance the discriminative ability of re-ID related feature representations, addressing the contradiction between intra-class diversity and pseudo-label accuracy. Unlike most disentanglement learning-based re-ID approaches that focus on separating explanatory factors, we design a spatial attention-disentangled mechanism to separate re-ID related and unrelated weights, enhancing the discriminative ability of cross-domain feature representation. Additionally, a multiple hard sample memory learning strategy is designed to express intra-class diversity of target samples using re-ID related features extracted from ADDNet. Extensive experiments show that ADDNet achieves 46.7% mAP on the Market-to-MSMT cross-domain re-ID task, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 6.5 points. •We propose an attention-disentangled re-ID network to explore more discriminative feature representations to resolve the contradiction between intra-class diversity and the stability of pseudo labels.•We propose a spatial attention-disentangled mechanism to separate the re-ID related and unrelated feature weights for abstracting re-ID related features.•We propose a multiple hard sample memory learning strategy to describe large intra-class semantic variations.