# Learning by Aligning: Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification using Cross-Modal Correspondences

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07422 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07422/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [Joint Discriminative and Generative Learning for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07223/) (2019)
- [Harmonious Attention Network for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08122/) (2018)
- [Person Re-identification: Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02984/) (2016)
- [Stereo Matching by Training a Convolutional Neural Network to Compare Image Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.05970/) (2015)
- [Relation-Aware Global Attention for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02998/) (2019)
- [Identity-Guided Human Semantic Parsing for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13467/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Dual-Attentive Aggregation Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09314/) (2020)
- [Learning to Compare Image Patches via Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.03641/) (2015)
- [RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Person Re-Identification via Joint Pixel and Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05839/) (2019)
- [Human Semantic Parsing for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00216/) (2018)
- [Improving Person Re-identification by Attribute and Identity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07220/) (2017)
- [Deep Exemplar-based Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06587/) (2018)
- [Cross-modality Person re-identification with Shared-Specific Feature Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12489/) (2020)
- [A Discriminatively Learned CNN Embedding for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05666/) (2016)
- [Deep Exemplar-based Video Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09909/) (2019)
- [FD-GAN: Pose-guided Feature Distilling GAN for Robust Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02936/) (2018)
- [Horizontal Pyramid Matching for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05275/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Diverse Embedding Expansion Network and Low-Light Cross-Modality Benchmark for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14481/) (2023)
- [Learning Progressive Modality-shared Transformers for Effective Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00226/) (2022)
- [Shape-Erased Feature Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04205/) (2023)
- [Modality Unifying Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06262/) (2023)
- [Multi-Memory Matching for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06825/) (2024)
- [Learning Modal-Invariant and Temporal-Memory for Video-based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02450/) (2022)
- [PartMix: Regularization Strategy to Learn Part Discovery for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01537/) (2023)
- [CLIP-Driven Semantic Discovery Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05806/) (2024)
- [Multi-spectral Vehicle Re-identification with Cross-directional Consistency Network and a High-quality Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00632/) (2022)
- [Efficient Bilateral Cross-Modality Cluster Matching for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12673/) (2023)
- [CMTR: Cross-modality Transformer for Visible-infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08994/) (2021)
- [High-Order Structure Based Middle-Feature Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07853/) (2023)
- [RLE: A Unified Perspective of Data Augmentation for Cross-Spectral Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01225/) (2024)
- [Occluded Person Re-Identification with Deep Learning: A Survey and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00603/) (2023)
- [Learning Commonality, Divergence and Variety for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19026/) (2024)
- [Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification Using Privileged Intermediate Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09348/) (2022)
- [Video-based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification with Auxiliary Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15571/) (2023)
- [Camera-LiDAR Cross-modality Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02038/) (2024)
- [Shape-centered Representation Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17952/) (2023)
- [Video-Level Language-Driven Video-Based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02439/) (2025)
- [Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification via Patch-Mixed Cross-Modality Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08212/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Gap: Multi-Level Cross-Modality Joint Alignment for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08316/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Ship Re-Identification via Optical and SAR Imagery: A Novel Dataset and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22027/) (2025)
- [WRIM-Net: Wide-Ranging Information Mining Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10624/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Generation of Privileged Intermediate Information for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03240/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modality Earth Mover's Distance for Visible Thermal Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01675/) (2022)
- [From Laboratory to Real World: A New Benchmark Towards Privacy-Preserved Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12232/) (2025)
- [Robust Duality Learning for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02549/) (2025)
- [X-ReID: Multi-granularity Information Interaction for Video-Based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17964/) (2025)
- [On Exploring Pose Estimation as an Auxiliary Learning Task for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03859/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the problem of visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-reID), that is, retrieving a set of person images, captured by visible or infrared cameras, in a cross-modal setting. Two main challenges in VI-reID are intra-class variations across person images, and cross-modal discrepancies between visible and infrared images. Assuming that the person images are roughly aligned, previous approaches attempt to learn coarse image- or rigid part-level person representations that are discriminative and generalizable across different modalities. However, the person images, typically cropped by off-the-shelf object detectors, are not necessarily well-aligned, which distract discriminative person representation learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel feature learning framework that addresses these problems in a unified way. To this end, we propose to exploit dense correspondences between cross-modal person images. This allows to address the cross-modal discrepancies in a pixel-level, suppressing modality-related features from person representations more effectively. This also encourages pixel-wise associations between cross-modal local features, further facilitating discriminative feature learning for VI-reID. Extensive experiments and analyses on standard VI-reID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly outperforms the state of the art.