  Visible-Infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is an important and
challenging task in intelligent video surveillance. Existing methods mainly
focus on learning a shared feature space to reduce the modality discrepancy
between visible and infrared modalities, which still leave two problems
underexplored: information redundancy and modality complementarity. To this
end, properly eliminating the identity-irrelevant information as well as making
up for the modality-specific information are critical and remains a challenging
endeavor. To tackle the above problems, we present a novel mutual information
and modality consensus network, namely CMInfoNet, to extract modality-invariant
identity features with the most representative information and reduce the
redundancies. The key insight of our method is to find an optimal
representation to capture more identity-relevant information and compress the
irrelevant parts by optimizing a mutual information bottleneck trade-off.
Besides, we propose an automatically search strategy to find the most prominent
parts that identify the pedestrians. To eliminate the cross- and intra-modality
variations, we also devise a modality consensus module to align the visible and
infrared modalities for task-specific guidance. Moreover, the global-local
feature representations can also be acquired for key parts discrimination.
Experimental results on four benchmarks, i.e., SYSU-MM01, RegDB,
Occluded-DukeMTMC, Occluded-REID, Partial-REID and Partial\_iLIDS dataset, have
demonstrated the effectiveness of CMInfoNet.
