With the widespread use of surveillance cameras in cities and on motorways, computer vision based intelligent systems are becoming a standard in the industry. Vehicle related problems such as Automatic License Plate Recognition have been addressed by computer vision systems, albeit in controlled settings (e.g.cameras installed at toll gates). Due to the freely available research data becoming available in the last few years, surveillance footage analysis for vehicle related problems are being studied with a computer vision focus. In this thesis, vision-based approaches for the problem of vehicle re-identification are investigated and original approaches are presented for various challenges of the problem. Computer vision based systems have advanced considerably in the last decade due to rapid improvements in machine learning with the advent of deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). At the core of the paradigm shift that has arrived with deep learning in machine learning is feature learning by multiple stacked neural network layers. Compared to traditional machine learning methods that utilise hand-crafted feature extraction and shallow model learning, deep neural networks can learn hierarchical feature representations as input data transform from low-level to high-level representation through consecutive neural network layers. Furthermore, machine learning tasks are trained in an end-to-end fashion that integrates feature extraction and machine learning methods into a combined framework using neural networks. This thesis focuses on visual feature learning with deep convolutional neural networks for the vehicle re-identification problem. The problem of re-identification has attracted attention from the computer vision community, especially for the person re-identification domain, whereas vehicle re-identification is relatively understudied. Re-identification is the problem of matching identities of subjects in images. The images come from non-overlapping viewing angles captured at varying locations, illuminations, etc. Compared to person re-identification, vehicle reidentification is particularly challenging as vehicles are manufactured to have the same visual appearance and shape that makes different instances visually indistinguishable. This thesis investigates solutions for the aforementioned challenges and makes the following contributions, improving accuracy and robustness of recent approaches. The contributions are the following: (1) Exploring the man-made nature of vehicles, that is, their hierarchical categories such as type (e.g.sedan, SUV) and model (e.g.Audi-2011-A4) and its usefulness in identity matching when identity pairwise labelling is not present (2) A new vehicle re-identification benchmark, Vehicle Re-Identification in Context (VRIC), is introduced to enable the design and evaluation of vehicle re-id methods to more closely reflect real-world application conditions compared to existing benchmarks. VRIC is uniquely characterised by unconstrained vehicle images in low resolution; from wide field of view traffic scene videos exhibiting variations of illumination, motion blur,and occlusion. (3) We evaluate the advantages of Multi-Scale Visual Representation (MSVR) in multi-scale cross-camera matching performance by training a multi-branch CNN model for vehicle re-identification enabled by the availability of low resolution images in VRIC. Experimental results indicate that this approach is useful in real-world settings where image resolution is low and varying across cameras. (4) With Multi-Task Mutual Learning (MTML) we propose a multi-modal learning representation e.g.using orientation as well as identity labels in training. We utilise deep convolutional neural networks with multiple branches to facilitate the learning of multi-modal and multi-scale deep features that increase re-identification performance, as well as orientation invariant feature learning
