# Cross-Modality Earth Mover's Distance for Visible Thermal Person Re-Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01675 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01675/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2022.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [A Strong Baseline and Batch Normalization Neck for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08332/) (2019)
- [Improving GANs Using Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05573/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Dual-Attentive Aggregation Learning for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09314/) (2020)
- [RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Person Re-Identification via Joint Pixel and Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05839/) (2019)
- [Cross-modality Person re-identification with Shared-Specific Feature Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12489/) (2020)
- [Cross-Modality Paired-Images Generation for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04114/) (2020)
- [Hi-CMD: Hierarchical Cross-Modality Disentanglement for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01230/) (2019)
- [Camera Style Adaptation for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10295/) (2017)
- [Learning by Aligning: Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification using Cross-Modal Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07422/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Sample Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08733/) (2020)
- [Neural Feature Search for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02366/) (2021)
- [Farewell to Mutual Information: Variational Distillation for Cross-Modal Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02862/) (2021)
- [Deep Network Flow for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08482/) (2017)
- [CM-NAS: Cross-Modality Neural Architecture Search for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08467/) (2021)
- [Improving Sequence-to-Sequence Learning via Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06283/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Text Generation via Feature-Mover's Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06297/) (2018)
- [Dual Gaussian-based Variational Subspace Disentanglement for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02520/) (2020)
- [SFANet: A Spectrum-aware Feature Augmentation Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12137/) (2021)
- [Enhancing the Discriminative Feature Learning for Visible-Thermal Cross-Modality Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09659/) (2019)
- [A Similarity Inference Metric for RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01504/) (2020)
- [HPILN: A feature learning framework for cross-modality person re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03142/) (2019)
- [Bi-directional Exponential Angular Triplet Loss for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00878/) (2020)
- [Attend to the Difference: Cross-Modality Person Re-identification via Contrastive Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11656/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [BIT: Matching-based Bi-directional Interaction Transformation Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14243/) (2026)
- [Cross-modal Local Shortest Path and Global Enhancement for Visible-Thermal Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04401/) (2022)
- [CycleTrans: Learning Neutral yet Discriminative Features for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09844/) (2022)
- [Find Them All: Unveiling MLLMs for Versatile Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06908/) (2025)
- [VC-FeS: Viewpoint-Conditioned Feature Selection for Vehicle Re-identification in Thermal Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04750/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visible thermal person re-identification (VT-ReID) suffers from the inter-modality discrepancy and intra-identity variations. Distribution alignment is a popular solution for VT-ReID, which, however, is usually restricted to the influence of the intra-identity variations. In this paper, we propose the Cross-Modality Earth Mover's Distance (CM-EMD) that can alleviate the impact of the intra-identity variations during modality alignment. CM-EMD selects an optimal transport strategy and assigns high weights to pairs that have a smaller intra-identity variation. In this manner, the model will focus on reducing the inter-modality discrepancy while paying less attention to intra-identity variations, leading to a more effective modality alignment. Moreover, we introduce two techniques to improve the advantage of CM-EMD. First, the Cross-Modality Discrimination Learning (CM-DL) is designed to overcome the discrimination degradation problem caused by modality alignment. By reducing the ratio between intra-identity and inter-identity variances, CM-DL leads the model to learn more discriminative representations. Second, we construct the Multi-Granularity Structure (MGS), enabling us to align modalities from both coarse- and fine-grained levels with the proposed CM-EMD. Extensive experiments show the benefits of the proposed CM-EMD and its auxiliary techniques (CM-DL and MGS). Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two VT-ReID benchmarks.