Hierarchical distillation learning for scalable person search
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Volume
114
Publisher
DOI
10.1016/j.patcog.2021.107862
Journal
PATTERN RECOGNITION
ISSN
0031-3203
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Existing person search methods typically focus on improving person detection accuracy. This ignores the model inference efficiency, which however is fundamentally significant for real-world applications. In this work, we address this limitation by investigating the scalability problem of person search involving both model accuracy and inference efficiency simultaneously. Specifically, we formulate a Hierarchical Distillation Learning (HDL) approach. With HDL, we aim to comprehensively distil the knowledge of a strong teacher model with strong learning capability to a lightweight student model with weak learning capability. To facilitate the HDL process, we design a simple and powerful teacher model for joint learning of person detection and person re-identification matching in unconstrained scene images. Extensive experiments show the modelling advantages and cost-effectiveness superiority of HDL over the state-of-the-art person search methods on three large person search benchmarks: CUHK-SYSU, PRW, and DukeMTMC-PS.