MARS: Paying more attention to visual attributes for text-based person search
<|reference_start|>MARS: Paying more attention to visual attributes for text-based person search: Text-based person search (TBPS) is a problem that gained significant interest within the research community. The task is that of retrieving one or more images of a specific individual based on a textual description. The multi-modal nature of the task requires learning representations that bridge text and image data within a shared latent space. Existing TBPS systems face two major challenges. One is defined as inter-identity noise that is due to the inherent vagueness and imprecision of text descriptions and it indicates how descriptions of visual attributes can be generally associated to different people; the other is the intra-identity variations, which are all those nuisances e.g. pose, illumination, that can alter the visual appearance of the same textual attributes for a given subject. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel TBPS architecture named MARS (Mae-Attribute-Relation-Sensitive), which enhances current state-of-the-art models by introducing two key components: a Visual Reconstruction Loss and an Attribute Loss. The former employs a Masked AutoEncoder trained to reconstruct randomly masked image patches with the aid of the textual description. In doing so the model is encouraged to learn more expressive representations and textual-visual relations in the latent space. The Attribute Loss, instead, balances the contribution of different types of attributes, defined as adjective-noun chunks of text. This loss ensures that every attribute is taken into consideration in the person retrieval process. Extensive experiments on three commonly used datasets, namely CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid, report performance improvements, with significant gains in the mean Average Precision (mAP) metric w.r.t. the current state of the art.<|reference_end|>
@article{ergasti2024mars:,
    title={MARS: Paying more attention to visual attributes for text-based person
  search},
    author={Alex Ergasti, Tomaso Fontanini, Claudio Ferrari, Massimo Bertozzi,
  Andrea Prati},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.04287},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.04287},
    primaryClass={cs.CV cs.AI}
}