No Arabic abstract
The fundamental difficulty in person re-identification (ReID) lies in learning the correspondence among individual cameras. It strongly demands costly inter-camera annotations, yet the trained models are not guaranteed to transfer well to previously unseen cameras. These problems significantly limit the application of ReID. This paper rethinks the working mechanism of conventional ReID approaches and puts forward a new solution. With an effective operator named Camera-based Batch Normalization (CBN), we force the image data of all cameras to fall onto the same subspace, so that the distribution gap between any camera pair is largely shrunk. This alignment brings two benefits. First, the trained model enjoys better abilities to generalize across scenarios with unseen cameras as well as transfer across multiple training sets. Second, we can rely on intra-camera annotations, which have been undervalued before due to the lack of cross-camera information, to achieve competitive ReID performance. Experiments on a wide range of ReID tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/automan000/Camera-based-Person-ReID.
Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods mostly exploit a large set of cross-camera identity labelled training data. This requires a tedious data collection and annotation process, leading to poor scalability in practical re-id applications. On the other hand unsupervised re-id methods do not need identity label information, but they usually suffer from much inferior and insufficient model performance. To overcome these fundamental limitations, we propose a novel person re-identification paradigm based on an idea of independent per-camera identity annotation. This eliminates the most time-consuming and tedious inter-camera identity labelling process, significantly reducing the amount of human annotation efforts. Consequently, it gives rise to a more scalable and more feasible setting, which we call Intra-Camera Supervised (ICS) person re-id, for which we formulate a Multi-tAsk mulTi-labEl (MATE) deep learning method. Specifically, MATE is designed for self-discovering the cross-camera identity correspondence in a per-camera multi-task inference framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate the cost-effectiveness superiority of our method over the alternative approaches on three large person re-id datasets. For example, MATE yields 88.7% rank-1 score on Market-1501 in the proposed ICS person re-id setting, significantly outperforming unsupervised learning models and closely approaching conventional fully supervised learning competitors.
Unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID) remains a challenging task. While extensive research has focused on the framework design or loss function, we show in this paper that sampling strategy plays an equally important role. We analyze the reasons for differences in performance between various sampling strategies under the same framework and loss function. We suggest that deteriorated over-fitting is an important factor causing poor performance, and enhancing statistical stability can rectify this issue. Inspired by that, a simple yet effective approach is proposed, known as group sampling, which gathers groups of samples from the same class into a mini-batch. The model is thereby trained using normalized group samples, which helps to alleviate the effects associated with a single sample. Group sampling updates the pipeline of pseudo label generation by guaranteeing that samples are more efficiently divided into the correct classes. Group sampling regulates the representation learning process, which enhances statistical stability for feature representation in a progressive fashion. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and MSMT17 show that group sampling improves upon state-of-the-art methods by between 3.3%~6.1%. Code has been available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/GroupSampling.
Person re-identification (ReID) aims at finding the same person in different cameras. Training such systems usually requires a large amount of cross-camera pedestrians to be annotated from surveillance videos, which is labor-consuming especially when the number of cameras is large. Differently, this paper investigates ReID in an unexplored single-camera-training (SCT) setting, where each person in the training set appears in only one camera. To the best of our knowledge, this setting was never studied before. SCT enjoys the advantage of low-cost data collection and annotation, and thus eases ReID systems to be trained in a brand new environment. However, it raises major challenges due to the lack of cross-camera person occurrences, which conventional approaches heavily rely on to extract discriminative features. The key to dealing with the challenges in the SCT setting lies in designing an effective mechanism to complement cross-camera annotation. We start with a regular deep network for feature extraction, upon which we propose a novel loss function named multi-camera negative loss (MCNL). This is a metric learning loss motivated by probability, suggesting that in a multi-camera system, one image is more likely to be closer to the most similar negative sample in other cameras than to the most similar negative sample in the same camera. In experiments, MCNL significantly boosts ReID accuracy in the SCT setting, which paves the way of fast deployment of ReID systems with good performance on new target scenes.
Although existing person re-identification (Re-ID) methods have shown impressive accuracy, most of them usually suffer from poor generalization on unseen target domain. Thus, generalizable person Re-ID has recently drawn increasing attention, which trains a model on source domains that generalizes well on unseen target domain without model updating. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive domain-specific normalization approach (AdsNorm) for generalizable person Re-ID. It describes unseen target domain as a combination of the known source ones, and explicitly learns domain-specific representation with target distribution to improve the models generalization by a meta-learning pipeline. Specifically, AdsNorm utilizes batch normalization layers to collect individual source domains characteristics, and maps source domains into a shared latent space by using these characteristics, where the domain relevance is measured by a distance function of different domain-specific normalization statistics and features. At the testing stage, AdsNorm projects images from unseen target domain into the same latent space, and adaptively integrates the domain-specific features carrying the source distributions by domain relevance for learning more generalizable aggregated representation on unseen target domain. Considering that target domain is unavailable during training, a meta-learning algorithm combined with a customized relation loss is proposed to optimize an effective and efficient ensemble model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdsNorm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/hzphzp/AdsNorm.
Intra-camera supervision (ICS) for person re-identification (Re-ID) assumes that identity labels are independently annotated within each camera view and no inter-camera identity association is labeled. It is a new setting proposed recently to reduce the burden of annotation while expect to maintain desirable Re-ID performance. However, the lack of inter-camera labels makes the ICS Re-ID problem much more challenging than the fully supervised counterpart. By investigating the characteristics of ICS, this paper proposes camera-specific non-parametric classifiers, together with a hybrid mining quintuplet loss, to perform intra-camera learning. Then, an inter-camera learning module consisting of a graph-based ID association step and a Re-ID model updating step is conducted. Extensive experiments on three large-scale Re-ID datasets show that our approach outperforms all existing ICS works by a great margin. Our approach performs even comparable to state-of-the-art fully supervised methods in two of the datasets.