FOCUS: Fine-grained Optimization with Semantic Guided Understanding for Pedestrian Attributes Recognition

Abstract: Pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR) is a fundamental perception task in intelligent transportation and security. To tackle this fine-grained task, most existing methods focus on extracting regional features to enrich attribute information. However, a regional feature is typically used to predict a fixed set of pre-defined attributes in these methods, which limits the performance and practicality in two aspects: 1) Regional features may compromise fine-grained patterns unique to certain attributes in favor of capturing common characteristics shared across attributes. 2) Regional features cannot generalize to predict unseen attributes in the test time. In this paper, we propose the \textbf{F}ine-grained \textbf{O}ptimization with semanti\textbf{C} g\textbf{U}ided under\textbf{S}tanding (FOCUS) approach for PAR, which adaptively extracts fine-grained attribute-level features for each attribute individually, regardless of whether the attributes are seen or not during training. Specifically, we propose the Multi-Granularity Mix Tokens (MGMT) to capture latent features at varying levels of visual granularity, thereby enriching the diversity of the extracted information. Next, we introduce the Attribute-guided Visual Feature Extraction (AVFE) module, which leverages textual attributes as queries to retrieve their corresponding visual attribute features from the Mix Tokens using a cross-attention mechanism. To ensure that textual attributes focus on the appropriate Mix Tokens, we further incorporate a Region-Aware Contrastive Learning (RACL) method, encouraging attributes within the same region to share consistent attention maps. Extensive experiments on PA100K, PETA, and RAPv1 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and strong generalization ability of our method.