Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods assume the provision of accurately cropped person bounding boxes with minimum background noise, mostly by manually cropping. This is significantly breached in practice when person bounding boxes must be detected automatically given a very large number of images and/or videos processed. Compared to carefully cropped manually, auto-detected bounding boxes are far less accurate with random amount of background clutter which can degrade notably person re-id matching accuracy. In this work, we develop a joint learning deep model that optimises person re-id attention selection within any auto-detected person bounding boxes by reinforcement learning of background clutter minimisation subject to re-id label pairwise constraints. Specifically, we formulate a novel unified re-id architecture called Identity DiscriminativE Attention reinforcement Learning (IDEAL) to accurately select re-id attention in auto-detected bounding boxes for optimising re-id performance. Our model can improve re-id accuracy comparable to that from exhaustive human manual cropping of bounding boxes with additional advantages from identity discriminative attention selection that specially benefits re-id tasks beyond human knowledge. Extensive comparative evaluations demonstrate the re-id advantages of the proposed IDEAL model over a wide range of state-of-the-art re-id methods on two auto-detected re-id benchmarks CUHK03 and Market-1501.
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