Human Reidentification with Transferred Metric Learning

Human reidentification is to match persons observed in nonoverlapping camera views with visual features for inter-camera tracking. The ambiguity increases with the number of candidates to be distinguished. Simple temporal reasoning can simplify the problem by pruning the candidate set to be matched. Existing approaches adopt a fixed metric for matching all the subjects. Our approach is motivated by the insight that different visual metrics should be optimally learned for different candidate sets. We tackle this problem under a transfer learning framework. Given a large training set, the training samples are selected and reweighted according to their visual similarities with the query sample and its candidate set. A weighted maximum margin metric is online learned and transferred from a generic metric to a candidate-set-specific metric. The whole online reweighting and learning process takes less than two seconds per candidate set. Experiments on the VIPeR dataset and our dataset show that the proposed transferred metric learning significantly outperforms directly matching visual features or using a single generic metric learned from the whole training set.