Unsupervised Adaptive Re-identification in Open World Dynamic Camera Networks

Person re-identification is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. Existing approaches have concentrated on either designing the best feature representation or learning optimal matching metrics in a static setting where the number of cameras are fixed in a network. Most approaches have neglected the dynamic and open world nature of the re-identification problem, where a new camera may be temporarily inserted into an existing system to get additional information. To address such a novel and very practical problem, we propose an unsupervised adaptation scheme for re-identification models in a dynamic camera network. First, we formulate a domain perceptive re-identification method based on geodesic flow kernel that can effectively find the best source camera (already installed) to adapt with a newly introduced target camera, without requiring a very expensive training phase. Second, we introduce a transitive inference algorithm for re-identification that can exploit the information from best source camera to improve the accuracy across other camera pairs in a network of multiple cameras. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning based alternatives whilst being extremely efficient to compute.Comment: CVPR 2017 Spotligh

Domain Adaptive Attention Model for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) across multiple datasets is a challenging yet important task due to the possibly large distinctions between different datasets and the lack of training samples in practical applications. This work proposes a novel unsupervised domain adaption framework which transfers discriminative representations from the labeled source domain (dataset) to the unlabeled target domain (dataset). We propose to formulate the domain adaption task as an one-class classification problem with a novel domain similarity loss. Given the feature map of any image from a backbone network, a novel domain adaptive attention model (DAAM) first automatically learns to separate the feature map of an image to a domain-shared feature (DSH) map and a domain-specific feature (DSP) map simultaneously. Specially, the residual attention mechanism is designed to model DSP feature map for avoiding negative transfer. Then, a DSH branch and a DSP branch are introduced to learn DSH and DSP feature maps respectively. To reduce domain divergence caused by that the source and target datasets are collected from different environments, we force to project the DSH feature maps from different domains to a new nominal domain, and a novel domain similarity loss is proposed based on one-class classification. In addition, a novel unsupervised person Re-ID loss is proposed to take full use of unlabeled target data. Extensive experiments on the Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method. Code will be released to facilitate further studies on the cross-domain person re-identification task

Multi-Domain Adversarial Feature Generalization for Person Re-Identification

With the assistance of sophisticated training methods applied to single labeled datasets, the performance of fully-supervised person re-identification (Person Re-ID) has been improved significantly in recent years. However, these models trained on a single dataset usually suffer from considerable performance degradation when applied to videos of a different camera network. To make Person Re-ID systems more practical and scalable, several cross-dataset domain adaptation methods have been proposed, which achieve high performance without the labeled data from the target domain. However, these approaches still require the unlabeled data of the target domain during the training process, making them impractical. A practical Person Re-ID system pre-trained on other datasets should start running immediately after deployment on a new site without having to wait until sufficient images or videos are collected and the pre-trained model is tuned. To serve this purpose, in this paper, we reformulate person re-identification as a multi-dataset domain generalization problem. We propose a multi-dataset feature generalization network (MMFA-AAE), which is capable of learning a universal domain-invariant feature representation from multiple labeled datasets and generalizing it to `unseen' camera systems. The network is based on an adversarial auto-encoder to learn a generalized domain-invariant latent feature representation with the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) measure to align the distributions across multiple domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our MMFA-AAE approach not only outperforms most of the domain generalization Person Re-ID methods, but also surpasses many state-of-the-art supervised methods and unsupervised domain adaptation methods by a large margin.Comment: TIP (Accept with Mandatory Minor Revisions

Progressive Cross-camera Soft-label Learning for Semi-supervised Person Re-identification

In this paper, we focus on the semi-supervised person re-identification (Re-ID) case, which only has the intra-camera (within-camera) labels but not inter-camera (cross-camera) labels. In real-world applications, these intra-camera labels can be readily captured by tracking algorithms or few manual annotations, when compared with cross-camera labels. In this case, it is very difficult to explore the relationships between cross-camera persons in the training stage due to the lack of cross-camera label information. To deal with this issue, we propose a novel Progressive Cross-camera Soft-label Learning (PCSL) framework for the semi-supervised person Re-ID task, which can generate cross-camera soft-labels and utilize them to optimize the network. Concretely, we calculate an affinity matrix based on person-level features and adapt them to produce the similarities between cross-camera persons (i.e., cross-camera soft-labels). To exploit these soft-labels to train the network, we investigate the weighted cross-entropy loss and the weighted triplet loss from the classification and discrimination perspectives, respectively. Particularly, the proposed framework alternately generates progressive cross-camera soft-labels and gradually improves feature representations in the whole learning course. Extensive experiments on five large-scale benchmark datasets show that PCSL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods that employ labeled source domains or the images generated by the GAN-based models. Furthermore, the proposed method even has a competitive performance with respect to deep supervised Re-ID methods.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT

A Novel Unsupervised Camera-aware Domain Adaptation Framework for Person Re-identification

Unsupervised cross-domain person re-identification (Re-ID) faces two key issues. One is the data distribution discrepancy between source and target domains, and the other is the lack of labelling information in target domain. They are addressed in this paper from the perspective of representation learning. For the first issue, we highlight the presence of camera-level sub-domains as a unique characteristic of person Re-ID, and develop camera-aware domain adaptation to reduce the discrepancy not only between source and target domains but also across these sub-domains. For the second issue, we exploit the temporal continuity in each camera of target domain to create discriminative information. This is implemented by dynamically generating online triplets within each batch, in order to maximally take advantage of the steadily improved feature representation in training process. Together, the above two methods give rise to a novel unsupervised deep domain adaptation framework for person Re-ID. Experiments and ablation studies on benchmark datasets demonstrate its superiority and interesting properties.Comment: Accepted by ICCV201

Transferable Joint Attribute-Identity Deep Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Most existing person re-identification (re-id) methods require supervised model learning from a separate large set of pairwise labelled training data for every single camera pair. This significantly limits their scalability and usability in real-world large scale deployments with the need for performing re-id across many camera views. To address this scalability problem, we develop a novel deep learning method for transferring the labelled information of an existing dataset to a new unseen (unlabelled) target domain for person re-id without any supervised learning in the target domain. Specifically, we introduce an Transferable Joint Attribute-Identity Deep Learning (TJ-AIDL) for simultaneously learning an attribute-semantic and identitydiscriminative feature representation space transferrable to any new (unseen) target domain for re-id tasks without the need for collecting new labelled training data from the target domain (i.e. unsupervised learning in the target domain). Extensive comparative evaluations validate the superiority of this new TJ-AIDL model for unsupervised person re-id over a wide range of state-of-the-art methods on four challenging benchmarks including VIPeR, PRID, Market-1501, and DukeMTMC-ReID.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 201

Data-driven pedestrian re-identification based on hierarchical semantic representation

Limited number of labeled data of surveillance video causes the training of supervised model for pedestrian re-identification to be a difficult task. Besides, applications of pedestrian re-identification in pedestrian retrieving and criminal tracking are limited because of the lack of semantic representation. In this paper, a data-driven pedestrian re-identification model based on hierarchical semantic representation is proposed, extracting essential features with unsupervised deep learning model and enhancing the semantic representation of features with hierarchical mid-level ‘attributes’. Firstly, CNNs, well-trained with the training process of CAEs, is used to extract features of horizontal blocks segmented from unlabeled pedestrian images. Then, these features are input into corresponding attribute classifiers to judge whether the pedestrian has the attributes. Lastly, with a table of ‘attributes-classes mapping relations’, final result can be calculated. Under the premise of improving the accuracy of attribute classifier, our qualitative results show its clear advantages over the CHUK02, VIPeR, and i-LIDS data set. Our proposed method is proved to effectively solve the problem of dependency on labeled data and lack of semantic expression, and it also significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and semanteme