Local distance comparison for multiple-shot people re-identification

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for multiple-shot people re-identification. To deal with the multimodal properties of the people appearance distribution, we formulate the re-identification problem as a local distance comparison problem, and introduce an energy-based loss function that measures the similarity between appearance instances by calculating the distance between corresponding subsets (with the same semantic meaning) in feature space. While the loss function favors short distances, which indicate high similarity between different appearances of people, it penalizes large distances and overlaps between subsets, which reflect low similarity between different appearances. In this way, fast people re-identification can be achieved in a robust manner against varying appearance. The performance of our approach has been evaluated by applying it to the public benchmark datasets ETHZ and CAVIAR4REID. Experimental results show significant improvements over previous reports. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.