Deep part-based methods in recent literature have revealed the great potential of learning local part-level representation for pedestrian image in the task of person re-identification. However, global features that capture discriminative holistic information of human body are usually ignored or not well exploited. This motivates us to investigate joint learning global and local features from pedestrian images. Specifically, in this work, we propose a novel framework termed tree branch network (TBN) for person re-identification. Given a pedestrain image, the feature maps generated by the backbone CNN, are partitioned recursively into serveral pieces, each of which is followed by a bottleneck structure that learns finer-grained features for each level in the hierarchical tree-like framework. In this way, represenations are learned in a coarse-to-fine manner and finally assembled to produce more discriminative image descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the global and local feature learning method in the proposed TBN framework. We also show significant improvement in performance over state-of-the-art methods on three public benchmarks: Market-1501, CUHK-03 and DukeMTMC.
 Existing person re-identification benchmarks and methods mainly focus on matching cropped pedestrian images between queries and candidates. However, it is different from real-world scenarios where the annotations of pedestrian bounding boxes are unavailable and the target person needs to be searched from a gallery of whole scene images. To close the gap, we propose a new deep learning framework for person search. Instead of breaking it down into two separate tasks&#x2014;pedestrian detection and person re-identification, we jointly handle both aspects in a single convolutional neural network. An Online Instance Matching (OIM) loss function is proposed to train the network effectively, which is scalable to datasets with numerous identities. To validate our approach, we collect and annotate a large-scale benchmark dataset for person search. It contains 18,184 images, 8,432 identities, and 96,143 pedestrian bounding boxes. Experiments show that our framework outperforms other separate approaches, and the proposed OIM loss function converges much faster and better than the conventional Softmax loss. Model distillation is an effective and widely used technique to transfer knowledge from a teacher to a student network. The typical application is to transfer from a powerful large network or ensemble to a small network, in order to meet the low-memory or fast execution requirements. In this paper, we present a deep mutual learning (DML) strategy. Different from the one-way transfer between a static pre-defined teacher and a student in model distillation, with DML, an ensemble of students learn collaboratively and teach each other throughout the training process. Our experiments show that a variety of network architectures benefit from mutual learning and achieve compelling results on both category and instance recognition tasks. Surprisingly, it is revealed that no prior powerful teacher network is necessary - mutual learning of a collection of simple student networks works, and moreover outperforms distillation from a more powerful yet static teacher.