Alice Benchmarks: Connecting Real World Object Re-Identification with the Synthetic

For object re-identification (re-ID), learning from synthetic data has become a promising strategy to cheaply acquire large-scale annotated datasets and effective models, with few privacy concerns. Many interesting research problems arise from this strategy, e.g., how to reduce the domain gap between synthetic source and real-world target. To facilitate developing more new approaches in learning from synthetic data, we introduce the Alice benchmarks, large-scale datasets providing benchmarks as well as evaluation protocols to the research community. Within the Alice benchmarks, two object re-ID tasks are offered: person and vehicle re-ID. We collected and annotated two challenging real-world target datasets: AlicePerson and AliceVehicle, captured under various illuminations, image resolutions, etc. As an important feature of our real target, the clusterability of its training set is not manually guaranteed to make it closer to a real domain adaptation test scenario. Correspondingly, we reuse existing PersonX and VehicleX as synthetic source domains. The primary goal is to train models from synthetic data that can work effectively in the real world. In this paper, we detail the settings of Alice benchmarks, provide an analysis of existing commonly-used domain adaptation methods, and discuss some interesting future directions. An online server will be set up for the community to evaluate methods conveniently and fairly.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

Large-scale Training Data Search for Object Re-identification

We consider a scenario where we have access to the target domain, but cannot afford on-the-fly training data annotation, and instead would like to construct an alternative training set from a large-scale data pool such that a competitive model can be obtained. We propose a search and pruning (SnP) solution to this training data search problem, tailored to object re-identification (re-ID), an application aiming to match the same object captured by different cameras. Specifically, the search stage identifies and merges clusters of source identities which exhibit similar distributions with the target domain. The second stage, subject to a budget, then selects identities and their images from the Stage I output, to control the size of the resulting training set for efficient training. The two steps provide us with training sets 80\% smaller than the source pool while achieving a similar or even higher re-ID accuracy. These training sets are also shown to be superior to a few existing search methods such as random sampling and greedy sampling under the same budget on training data size. If we release the budget, training sets resulting from the first stage alone allow even higher re-ID accuracy. We provide interesting discussions on the specificity of our method to the re-ID problem and particularly its role in bridging the re-ID domain gap. The code is available at https://github.com/yorkeyao/SnP.Comment: Accepted to CVPR202

Parameter-Efficient Person Re-identification in the 3D Space

People live in a 3D world. However, existing works on person re-identification (re-id) mostly consider the semantic representation learning in a 2D space, intrinsically limiting the understanding of people. In this work, we address this limitation by exploring the prior knowledge of the 3D body structure. Specifically, we project 2D images to a 3D space and introduce a novel parameter-efficient Omni-scale Graph Network (OG-Net) to learn the pedestrian representation directly from 3D point clouds. OG-Net effectively exploits the local information provided by sparse 3D points and takes advantage of the structure and appearance information in a coherent manner. With the help of 3D geometry information, we can learn a new type of deep re-id feature free from noisy variants, such as scale and viewpoint. To our knowledge, we are among the first attempts to conduct person re-identification in the 3D space. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that the proposed method (1) eases the matching difficulty in the traditional 2D space, (2) exploits the complementary information of 2D appearance and 3D structure, (3) achieves competitive results with limited parameters on four large-scale person re-id datasets, and (4) has good scalability to unseen datasets.Comment: The code is available at https://github.com/layumi/person-reid-3

StRDAN: Synthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation Network for Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification aims to obtain the same vehicles from vehicle images. This is challenging but essential for analyzing and predicting traffic flow in the city. Although deep learning methods have achieved enormous progress for this task, their large data requirement is a critical shortcoming. Therefore, we propose a synthetic-to-real domain adaptation network (StRDAN) framework, which can be trained with inexpensive large-scale synthetic and real data to improve performance. The StRDAN training method combines domain adaptation and semi-supervised learning methods and their associated losses. StRDAN offers significant improvement over the baseline model, which can only be trained using real data, for VeRi and CityFlow-ReID datasets, achieving 3.1% and 12.9% improved mean average precision, respectively.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, CVPR Workshop Paper (Revised

Enhancing vehicle re-identification via synthetic training datasets and re-ranking based on video-clips information

Vehicle re-identification (ReID) aims to find a specific vehicle identity across multiple non-overlapping cameras. The main challenge of this task is the large intra-class and small inter-class variability of vehicles appearance, sometimes related with large viewpoint variations, illumination changes or different camera resolutions. To tackle these problems, we proposed a vehicle ReID system based on ensembling deep learning features and adding different post-processing techniques. In this paper, we improve that proposal by: incorporating large-scale synthetic datasets in the training step; performing an exhaustive ablation study showing and analyzing the influence of synthetic content in ReID datasets, in particular CityFlow-ReID and VeRi-776; and extending post-processing by including different approaches to the use of gallery video-clips of the target vehicles in the re-ranking step. Additionally, we present an evaluation framework in order to evaluate CityFlow-ReID: as this dataset has not public ground truth annotations, AI City Challenge provided an on-line evaluation service which is no more available; our evaluation framework allows researchers to keep on evaluating the performance of their systems in the CityFlow-ReID datasetOpen Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Natur