Unsupervised learning of generative topic saliency for person re-identification

(c) 2014. The copyright of this document resides with its authors. It may be distributed unchanged freely in print or electronic forms.© 2014. The copyright of this document resides with its authors. Existing approaches to person re-identification (re-id) are dominated by supervised learning based methods which focus on learning optimal similarity distance metrics. However, supervised learning based models require a large number of manually labelled pairs of person images across every pair of camera views. This thus limits their ability to scale to large camera networks. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a novel unsupervised re-id modelling approach by exploring generative probabilistic topic modelling. Given abundant unlabelled data, our topic model learns to simultaneously both (1) discover localised person foreground appearance saliency (salient image patches) that are more informative for re-id matching, and (2) remove busy background clutters surrounding a person. Extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing unsupervised learning re-id methods with significantly simplified model complexity. In the meantime, it still retains comparable re-id accuracy when compared to the state-of-the-art supervised re-id methods but without any need for pair-wise labelled training data

Multi-scale Deep Learning Architectures for Person Re-identification

Person Re-identification (re-id) aims to match people across non-overlapping camera views in a public space. It is a challenging problem because many people captured in surveillance videos wear similar clothes. Consequently, the differences in their appearance are often subtle and only detectable at the right location and scales. Existing re-id models, particularly the recently proposed deep learning based ones match people at a single scale. In contrast, in this paper, a novel multi-scale deep learning model is proposed. Our model is able to learn deep discriminative feature representations at different scales and automatically determine the most suitable scales for matching. The importance of different spatial locations for extracting discriminative features is also learned explicitly. Experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the art on a number of benchmarksComment: 9 pages, 3 figures, accepted by ICCV 201