Augmented Geometric Distillation for Data-Free Incremental Person ReID

Abstract

Incremental learning (IL) remains an open issue for Person Re-identification (ReID), where a ReID system is expected to preserve preceding knowledge while learning incrementally. However, due to the strict privacy licenses and the open-set retrieval setting, it is intractable to adapt existing class IL methods to ReID. In this work, we propose an Augmented Geometric Distillation (AGD) framework to tackle these issues. First, a general data-free incremental framework with dreaming memory is constructed to avoid privacy disclosure. On this basis, we reveal a "noisy distillation" problem stemming from the noise in dreaming memory, and further propose to augment distillation in a pairwise and cross-wise pattern over different views of memory to mitigate it. Second, for the open-set retrieval property, we propose to maintain feature space structure during evolving via a novel geometric way and preserve relationships between exemplars when representations drift. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our AGD to baseline with a margin of 6.0% mAP / 7.9% R@1 and it could be generalized to class IL. Code is available.