  Text-based Person Search (TBPS) aims to retrieve images of target pedestrian
indicated by textual descriptions. It is essential for TBPS to extract
fine-grained local features and align them crossing modality. Existing methods
utilize external tools or heavy cross-modal interaction to achieve explicit
alignment of cross-modal fine-grained features, which is inefficient and
time-consuming. In this work, we propose a Vision-Guided Semantic-Group Network
(VGSG) for text-based person search to extract well-aligned fine-grained visual
and textual features. In the proposed VGSG, we develop a Semantic-Group Textual
Learning (SGTL) module and a Vision-guided Knowledge Transfer (VGKT) module to
extract textual local features under the guidance of visual local clues. In
SGTL, in order to obtain the local textual representation, we group textual
features from the channel dimension based on the semantic cues of language
expression, which encourages similar semantic patterns to be grouped implicitly
without external tools. In VGKT, a vision-guided attention is employed to
extract visual-related textual features, which are inherently aligned with
visual cues and termed vision-guided textual features. Furthermore, we design a
relational knowledge transfer, including a vision-language similarity transfer
and a class probability transfer, to adaptively propagate information of the
vision-guided textual features to semantic-group textual features. With the
help of relational knowledge transfer, VGKT is capable of aligning
semantic-group textual features with corresponding visual features without
external tools and complex pairwise interaction. Experimental results on two
challenging benchmarks demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art
methods.
