  In real-world video surveillance applications, person re-identification
(ReID) suffers from the effects of occlusions and detection errors. Despite
recent advances, occlusions continue to corrupt the features extracted by
state-of-art CNN backbones, and thereby deteriorate the accuracy of ReID
systems. To address this issue, methods in the literature use an additional
costly process such as pose estimation, where pose maps provide supervision to
exclude occluded regions. In contrast, we introduce a novel Holistic Guidance
(HG) method that relies only on person identity labels, and on the distribution
of pairwise matching distances of datasets to alleviate the problem of
occlusion, without requiring additional supervision. Hence, our proposed
student-teacher framework is trained to address the occlusion problem by
matching the distributions of between- and within-class distances (DCDs) of
occluded samples with that of holistic (non-occluded) samples, thereby using
the latter as a soft labeled reference to learn well separated DCDs. This
approach is supported by our empirical study where the distribution of between-
and within-class distances between images have more overlap in occluded than
holistic datasets. In particular, features extracted from both datasets are
jointly learned using the student model to produce an attention map that allows
separating visible regions from occluded ones. In addition to this, a joint
generative-discriminative backbone is trained with a denoising autoencoder,
allowing the system to self-recover from occlusions. Extensive experiments on
several challenging public datasets indicate that the proposed approach can
outperform state-of-the-art methods on both occluded and holistic datasets
