Relation-Aware Weight Sharing in Decoupling Feature Learning Network for UAV RGB-Infrared Vehicle Re-Identification

Owing to the capacity of performing full-time target searches, cross-modality vehicle re-identification based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is gaining more attention in both video surveillance and public security. However, this promising and innovative research has not been studied sufficiently due to the issue of data inadequacy. Meanwhile, the cross-modality discrepancy and orientation discrepancy challenges further aggravate the difficulty of this task. To this end, we pioneer a cross-modality vehicle Re-ID benchmark named UAV Cross-Modality Vehicle Re-ID (UCM-VeID), containing 753 identities with 16015 RGB and 13913 infrared images. Moreover, to meet cross-modality discrepancy and orientation discrepancy challenges, we present a hybrid weights decoupling network (HWDNet) to learn the shared discriminative orientation-invariant features. For the first challenge, we proposed a hybrid weights siamese network with a well-designed weight restrainer and its corresponding objective function to learn both modality-specific and modality shared information. In terms of the second challenge, three effective decoupling structures with two pretext tasks are investigated to flexibly conduct orientation-invariant feature separation task. Comprehensive experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.