Data compensation and feature fusion for sketch based person retrieval

Sketch re-identification (Re-ID) aims to retrieve pedestrian photo in the gallery dataset by a query sketch drawn by professionals. The sketch Re-ID task has not been adequately studied because collecting such sketches is difficult and expensive. In addition, the significant modality difference between sketches and images makes extracting the discriminative feature information difficult. To address above issues, we introduce a novel sketch-style pedestrian dataset named Pseudo-Sketch dataset. Our proposed dataset maximizes the utilization of the existing person dataset resources and is freely available, thus effectively reducing the expenses associated with the training and deployment phases. Furthermore, to mitigate the modality gap between sketches and visible images, a cross-modal feature fusion network is proposed that incorporates information from each modality. Experiment results show that the proposed Pseudo-Sketch dataset can effectively complement the real sketch dataset, and the proposed network obtains competitive results than SOTA methods. The dataset will be released later.