# SM-SGE: A Self-Supervised Multi-Scale Skeleton Graph Encoding Framework for Person Re-Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.01903 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01903/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Multiscale Graph Neural Networks for 3D Skeleton-Based Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08802/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation = 2D Pose Estimation + Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06524/) (2016)
- [Space-Time Representation of People Based on 3D Skeletal Data: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.01006/) (2016)
- [A Self-Supervised Gait Encoding Approach with Locality-Awareness for 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03671/) (2020)
- [Robust Depth-based Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09474/) (2017)
- [Recurrent Attention Models for Depth-Based Person Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07212/) (2016)
- [Self-Supervised Gait Encoding with Locality-Aware Attention for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09435/) (2020)
- [Multi-Level Graph Encoding with Structural-Collaborative Relation Learning for Skeleton-Based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03069/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [TranSG: Transformer-Based Skeleton Graph Prototype Contrastive Learning with Structure-Trajectory Prompted Reconstruction for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06819/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Skeleton Meta-Prototype Contrastive Learning with Hard Skeleton Mining for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12917/) (2023)
- [SimMC: Simple Masked Contrastive Learning of Skeleton Representations for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09826/) (2022)
- [Skeleton Prototype Contrastive Learning with Multi-Level Graph Relation Modeling for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11814/) (2022)
- [Language-Assisted Human Part Motion Learning for Skeleton-Based Temporal Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06353/) (2024)
- [MMAPS: End-to-End Multi-Grained Multi-Modal Attribute-Aware Product Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11351/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15296/) (2024)
- [Reliability-Aware 3D Geometric Injection for Universal Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18863/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Person re-identification via 3D skeletons is an emerging topic with great potential in security-critical applications. Existing methods typically learn body and motion features from the body-joint trajectory, whereas they lack a systematic way to model body structure and underlying relations of body components beyond the scale of body joints. In this paper, we for the first time propose a Self-supervised Multi-scale Skeleton Graph Encoding (SM-SGE) framework that comprehensively models human body, component relations, and skeleton dynamics from unlabeled skeleton graphs of various scales to learn an effective skeleton representation for person Re-ID. Specifically, we first devise multi-scale skeleton graphs with coarse-to-fine human body partitions, which enables us to model body structure and skeleton dynamics at multiple levels. Second, to mine inherent correlations between body components in skeletal motion, we propose a multi-scale graph relation network to learn structural relations between adjacent body-component nodes and collaborative relations among nodes of different scales, so as to capture more discriminative skeleton graph features. Last, we propose a novel multi-scale skeleton reconstruction mechanism to enable our framework to encode skeleton dynamics and high-level semantics from unlabeled skeleton graphs, which encourages learning a discriminative skeleton representation for person Re-ID. Extensive experiments show that SM-SGE outperforms most state-of-the-art skeleton-based methods. We further demonstrate its effectiveness on 3D skeleton data estimated from large-scale RGB videos. Our codes are open at https://github.com/Kali-Hac/SM-SGE.