A novel pedestrian reidentification method based on a multiview generative adversarial network

Abstract

Emerging deep learning (DL) techniques have greatly improved pedestrian reidentification (PRI) performance. However, the existing DL-based PRI methods cannot learn robust feature representations owing to the single view of query images and the limited number of extractable features. Inspired by generative adversarial networks (GANs), this paper proposes a novel PRI method based on a pedestrian multiview GAN (PmGAN) and a classification recognition network (CRN). The PmGAN consists of three generators and one multiclass discriminator. The three generators produce pedestrian images from the front, side and back, while the multiclass discriminator determines whether the input image is a real image or a generated image. In addition to expanding the existing pedestrian datasets, the PmGAN can generate pedestrian images from front, side and back views based on a given query image and thereby increase the feature semantic space of the query image. To verify the performance of our method, the PmGAN was compared with mainstream pedestrian image generation models, and then the proposed method was contrasted with mainstream PRI methods. The results show that the proposed PmGAN greatly improved the performance of mainstream PRI methods. For example, the combination of the PmGAN and Pyramidal increased the mean average precision (mAP) on three common datasets by 1.2% on average. The research findings provide new insights into the application of multiview generation in PRI tasks.