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MCFL: multi-label contrastive focal loss for deep imbalanced pedestrian attribute recognition

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Abstract

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) can provide valuable clues for several innovative surveillance applications. It is also a difficult task because inference of the multiple attributes at a far distance is challenging in real complex scenarios. Most existing methods improve the PAR with visual attention mechanisms or body-part detection modules, which increase the complexity of networks and require manual annotations of the human body. Also, uneven data distribution, leading to a decline in recall values, is still underestimated. This paper presents a novel multi-label optimization algorithm to mitigate these issues, named Multi-label Contrastive Focal Loss (MCFL). Specifically, we first propose a multi-label focal loss to emphasize the error-prone and minority attributes with a separated re-weighting scheme. And then, we introduce a multi-label contrastive learning strategy based on the multi-label divergences to help the deep network to distinguish the hard fine-grained attributes. We conduct extensive experiments on seven PAR benchmarks, and results indicate that the proposed MCFL with the native ResNet-50 backbone surpasses the state-of-the-art comparison methods in mean accuracy and recall.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (61902370), and in part by the Chongqing Research Program of Technology Innovation and Application (cstc2019jscx-zdztzxX0019), and is also by the key cooperation project of the Chongqing Municipal Eduction Commission (HZ2021008 and HZ2021017).

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  1. Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing, 400714, China

    Lin Chen, Xuerui Zhang & Mingsheng Shang

  2. University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, Sichuan, China

    Jingkuan Song

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  1. Lin Chen
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Correspondence to Mingsheng Shang.

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Chen, L., Song, J., Zhang, X. et al. MCFL: multi-label contrastive focal loss for deep imbalanced pedestrian attribute recognition. Neural Comput & Applic 34, 16701–16715 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-022-07300-7

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