VIPerson: Flexibly Generating Virtual Identity for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (ReID) is to match the person images under different camera views. Training ReID models necessitates a substantial amount of labeled real-world data, leading to high labeling costs and privacy issues. Although several ReID data synthetic methods are proposed to address these issues, they fail to generate images with real-world camera style or new identities. In this paper, we propose a novel pedestrian generation pipeline, VIPerson, to generate camera-realistic pedestrian images with flexible Virtual Identities for the Person ReID task. VIPerson focuses on three key factors in data synthesis: (I) Virtual identity diversity: Enhancing the latent diffusion model with our proposed dropout text embedding, we flexibly generate random and hard identities. (II) Scalable cross-camera variations: VIPerson introduces scalable variations of scenes and poses within each identity. (III) Camera-realistic style: Adopting an identity-agnostic approach to transfer realistic styles, we avoid privacy exposure of real identities. Extensive experimental results across a broad range of downstream ReID tasks demonstrate the superiority of our generated dataset over existing methods. In addition, VIPerson can be adapted to the privacy-constrained ReID scenario, which widens the application of our pipeline. We will release our code and datasets.