Person re-ID while Crossing Different Cameras: Combination of Salient-Gaussian Weighted BossaNova and Fisher Vector Encodings

Person re-identification (re-ID) is a challenging task in the camera surveillance field, since it addresses the problem of re-identifying people across multiple non-overlapping cameras. Most of existing approaches have been concentrated on: 1) achieving a robust and effective feature representation; and 2) enforcing discriminative metric learning to predict if two images represent the same identity. In this context, we present a new approach for person re-ID built upon multi-level descriptors. This is achieved by combining three complementary representations: salient-Gaussian Fisher Vector (SGFV) encoding method, salient-Gaussian BossaNova (SGBN) histogram encoding method and deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features. The two first methods adapt the histogram encoding framework to the person re-ID task. This is achieved by integrating the pedestrian saliency map and the spatial location information, in the histogram encoding process. On one hand, human saliency is reliable and distinctive in the person re-ID task, since it can model the uniqueness of the identity. On the other hand, localizing a person in the image can effectively discard noisy background information. Finally, one of the most advanced metric learning in person re-ID: the Cross-view Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (XQDA) is applied on the top of the resulting description. The proposed method yields promising person re-ID results on two challenging image-based person re-ID benchmarks: CUHK03 and Market-1501. Keywords—Person re-identification; histogram encoding; fisher vector; BossaNova; Convolutional Neural Network (CNN); salient weight; Gaussian weight