Infer the Whole from a Glimpse of a Part: Keypoint-Based Knowledge Graph for Vehicle Re-Identification

Abstract

Vehicle re-identification aims to match vehicles across non-overlapping camera views. Many existing methods extract features from one specific image, and these methods lack view-invariance when comparing vehicles of different orientations. As a result, discriminative parts obscured by viewpoint changes cannot contribute effectively to matching. This work presents a novel keypoint-based framework for vehicle Re-ID. We propose to explicitly model the intrinsic structural relationships between vehicle components via knowledge graph. By establishing connection between keypoints, our approach aims to leverage such prior to match vehicles even when some parts are not directly comparable due to orientation inconsistencies. Specifically, given query and gallery images, we first detect visible keypoints. Then, a transformer-based model infers features for non-overlapped keypoints by conditioning on visible correspondences defined in the knowledge graph. The final representation integrates visible and inferred features. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-arts on standard benchmarks under cross-view matching scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first work introducing structural priors via keypoint knowledge graphs for view-invariant vehicle re-identification.