A Data-Centric Approach to Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: Synthetic Augmentation via Prompt-driven Diffusion Models

Abstract: Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is a challenging task as models are required to generalize across numerous attributes in real-world data. Traditional approaches focus on complex methods, yet recognition performance is often constrained by training dataset limitations, particularly the under-representation of certain attributes. In this paper, we propose a data-centric approach to improve PAR by synthetic data augmentation guided by textual descriptions. First, we define a protocol to identify weakly recognized attributes across multiple datasets. Second, we propose a prompt-driven pipeline that leverages diffusion models to generate synthetic pedestrian images while preserving the consistency of PAR datasets. Finally, we derive a strategy to seamlessly incorporate synthetic samples into training data, which considers prompt-based annotation rules and modifies the loss function. Results on popular PAR datasets demonstrate that our approach not only boosts recognition of underrepresented attributes but also improves overall model performance beyond the targeted attributes. Notably, this approach strengthens zero-shot generalization without requiring architectural changes of the model, presenting an efficient and scalable solution to improve the recognition of attributes of pedestrians in the real world.