Person re-identification with effectively designed parts

Abstract

Person re-IDentification (re-ID) is an important research topic in the computer vision community, with significance for a range of applications. Pedestrians are well-structured objects that can be partitioned, although detection errors cause slightly misaligned bounding boxes, which lead to mismatches. In this paper, we study the person re-identification performance of using variously designed pedestrian parts instead of the horizontal partitioning routine typically applied in previous hand-crafted part works, and thereby obtain more effective feature descriptors. Specifically, we benchmark the accuracy of individual part matching with discriminatively trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) descriptors on the Market-1501 dataset. We also investigate the complementarity among different parts using combination and ablation studies, and provide novel insights into this issue. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method yields a competitive accuracy rate when the best part combination is used on two large-scale datasets (Market-1501 and CUHK03) and one small-scale dataset (VIPeR).