VRCLIP: Multimodal Canonical Correlation Alignment for CLIP-Driven Vision-Radio Person Re-Identification

摘要

Multimodal person Re-IDentification (ReID) aims to reliably associate specific individuals by utilizing complementary information from heterogeneous modalities. In contrast, low-frequency radio frequency (RF) signals, with their superior penetration capability and illumination invariance, provide ideal complementary information. However, a key challenge in fusing these heterogeneous modalities lies in the conventional approach that relies heavily on cross-modal distribution matching, which often over-regularizes and weakens the discriminative capacity within each modality. Rather than enforcing direct distribution alignment, canonical correlation analysis (CCA) constructs a shared subspace that maximizes cross-modal correlation, inherently balancing modality specificity and shared semantics. Inspired by this, we reformulate cross-modal alignment as a correlation maximization problem, avoiding direct constraints on feature distributions and guiding the model to harmonize intra-modal discriminative learning with cross-modal alignment. Specifically, VRCLIP first refines CLIP's visual encoder with illumination-disentangling objectives, then aligns RGB and RF embeddings in a canonical correlation subspace, and finally employs an RF-anchored reliability gate for adaptive fusion. To advance the area, we will release VRR, the first large-scale vision-radio ReID dataset with over 650K paired image-radar samples and position annotations for 31 participants. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art 93.9% mAP and robust generalization across diverse lighting and occlusion conditions.