Lifelong visible–infrared person re-identification via replay samples domain-modality-mix reconstruction and cross-domain cognitive network

Adapting statically-trained models to the incessant influx of data streams poses a pivotal research challenge. Concurrently, visible and infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) offers an all-day surveillance mode to advance intelligent surveillance and elevate public safety precautions. Hence, we are pioneering a more fine-grained exploration of the lifelong VI-ReID task at the camera level, aiming to imbue the learned models with the capabilities of lifelong learning and memory within the continuous data streams. This task confronts dual challenges of cross-modality and cross-domain variations. Thus, in this paper, we proposed a Domain-Modality-Mix (DMM) based replay samples reconstruction strategy and Cross-domain Cognitive Network (CDCN) to address those challenges. Firstly, we establish an effective and expandable baseline model based on residual neural networks. Secondly, capitalizing on the unexploited potential knowledge of a memory bank that archives diverse replay samples, we enhance the anti-forgetting ability of our model by the Domain-Modality-Mix strategy, which devising a cross-domain, cross-modal image-level replay sample reconstruction, effectively alleviating catastrophic forgetting induced by modality and domain variations. Finally, guided by the Chunking Theory in cognitive psychology, we designed a Cross-domain Cognitive Network, which incorporates a camera-aware, expandable graph convolutional cognitive network to facilitate adaptive learning of intra-modal consistencies and cross-modal similarities within continuous cross-domain data streams. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method has remarkable adaptability and robust resistance to forgetting and outperforms multiple state-of-the-art methods in comparative assessments of the performance of LVI-ReID. The source code of our designed method is at https://github.com/SWU-CS-MediaLab/DMM-CDCN.