  Text-based person search aims to retrieve the corresponding person images in
an image database by virtue of a describing sentence about the person, which
poses great potential for various applications such as video surveillance.
Extracting visual contents corresponding to the human description is the key to
this cross-modal matching problem. Moreover, correlated images and descriptions
involve different granularities of semantic relevance, which is usually ignored
in previous methods. To exploit the multilevel corresponding visual contents,
we propose a pose-guided multi-granularity attention network (PMA). Firstly, we
propose a coarse alignment network (CA) to select the related image regions to
the global description by a similarity-based attention. To further capture the
phrase-related visual body part, a fine-grained alignment network (FA) is
proposed, which employs pose information to learn latent semantic alignment
between visual body part and textual noun phrase. To verify the effectiveness
of our model, we perform extensive experiments on the CUHK Person Description
Dataset (CUHK-PEDES) which is currently the only available dataset for
text-based person search. Experimental results show that our approach
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 15 \% in terms of the top-1 metric.
