Multi-Image Graph Cut Clothing Segmentation for Recognizing People

Reseachers have verified that clothing provides information about the identity of the individual. To extract features from the clothing, the clothing region first must be localized or segmented in the image. At the same time, given multiple images of the same person wearing the same clothing, we expect to improve the effectiveness of clothing segmentation. Therefore, the identity recognition and clothing segmentation problems are inter-twined; a good solution for one aides in the solution for the other. We build on this idea by analyzing the mutual information between pixel locations near the face and the identity of the person to learn a global clothing mask. We segment the clothing region in each image using graph cuts based on a clothing model learned from one or multiple images believed to be the same person wearing the same clothing. We use facial features and clothing features to recognize individuals in other images. The results show that clothing segmentation provides a significant improvement in recognition accuracy for large image collections, and useful clothing masks are simultaneously produced. A further significant contribution is that we introduce a publicly available consumer image collection where each individual is identified. We hope this dataset allows the vision community to more easily compare results for tasks related to recognizing people in consumer image collections.