  Person re-identification (reID) aims to match person images to retrieve the
ones with the same identity. This is a challenging task, as the images to be
matched are generally semantically misaligned due to the diversity of human
poses and capture viewpoints, incompleteness of the visible bodies (due to
occlusion), etc. In this paper, we propose a framework that drives the reID
network to learn semantics-aligned feature representation through delicate
supervision designs. Specifically, we build a Semantics Aligning Network (SAN)
which consists of a base network as encoder (SA-Enc) for re-ID, and a decoder
(SA-Dec) for reconstructing/regressing the densely semantics aligned full
texture image. We jointly train the SAN under the supervisions of person
re-identification and aligned texture generation. Moreover, at the decoder,
besides the reconstruction loss, we add Triplet ReID constraints over the
feature maps as the perceptual losses. The decoder is discarded in the
inference and thus our scheme is computationally efficient. Ablation studies
demonstrate the effectiveness of our design. We achieve the state-of-the-art
performances on the benchmark datasets CUHK03, Market1501, MSMT17, and the
partial person reID dataset Partial REID. Code for our proposed method is
available at:
https://github.com/microsoft/Semantics-Aligned-Representation-Learning-for-Person-Re-identification.
