Identity-Guided Spatial Attention for Vehicle Re-Identification

In vehicle re-identification, identifying a specific vehicle from a large image dataset is challenging due to occlusion and complex backgrounds. Deep models struggle to identify vehicles accurately when critical details are occluded or the background is distracting. To mitigate the impact of these noisy factors, we propose Identity-guided Spatial Attention (ISA) to extract more beneficial details for vehicle re-identification. Our approach begins by visualizing the high activation regions of a strong baseline method and identifying noisy objects involved during training. ISA generates an attention map to mask most discriminative areas, without the need for manual annotation. Finally, the ISA map refines the embedding feature in an end-to-end manner to improve vehicle re-identification accuracy. Visualization experiments demonstrate ISA’s ability to capture nearly all vehicle details, while results on three vehicle re-identification datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.