  Multi-spectral vehicle re-identification aims to address the challenge of
identifying vehicles in complex lighting conditions by incorporating
complementary visible and infrared information. However, in harsh environments,
the discriminative cues in RGB and NIR modalities are often lost due to strong
flares from vehicle lamps or sunlight, and existing multi-modal fusion methods
are limited in their ability to recover these important cues. To address this
problem, we propose a Flare-Aware Cross-modal Enhancement Network that
adaptively restores flare-corrupted RGB and NIR features with guidance from the
flare-immunized thermal infrared spectrum. First, to reduce the influence of
locally degraded appearance due to intense flare, we propose a Mutual Flare
Mask Prediction module to jointly obtain flare-corrupted masks in RGB and NIR
modalities in a self-supervised manner. Second, to use the flare-immunized TI
information to enhance the masked RGB and NIR, we propose a Flare-Aware
Cross-modal Enhancement module that adaptively guides feature extraction of
masked RGB and NIR spectra with prior flare-immunized knowledge from the TI
spectrum. Third, to extract common informative semantic information from RGB
and NIR, we propose an Inter-modality Consistency loss that enforces semantic
consistency between the two modalities. Finally, to evaluate the proposed
FACENet in handling intense flare, we introduce a new multi-spectral vehicle
re-ID dataset, called WMVEID863, with additional challenges such as motion
blur, significant background changes, and particularly intense flare
degradation. Comprehensive experiments on both the newly collected dataset and
public benchmark multi-spectral vehicle re-ID datasets demonstrate the superior
performance of the proposed FACENet compared to state-of-the-art methods,
especially in handling strong flares. The code and dataset will be released at
this link.
