Deep feature learning with relative distance comparison for person re-identification

Identifying the same individual across different scenes is an important yet difficult task in intelligent video surveillance. Its main difficulty lies in how to preserve similarity of the same person against large appearance and structure variation while discriminating different individuals. In this paper, we present a scalable distance driven feature learning framework based on the deep neural network for person reidentification, and demonstrate its effectiveness to handle the existing challenges. Specifically, given the training images with the class labels (person IDs), we first produce a large number of triplet units, each of which contains three images, i.e. one person with a matched reference and a mismatched reference. Treating the units as the input, we build the convolutional neural network to generate the layered representations, and follow with the L2 distance metric. By means of parameter optimization, our framework tends to maximize the relative distance between the matched pair and the mismatched pair for each triplet unit. Moreover, a nontrivial issue arising with the framework is that the triplet organization cubically enlarges the number of training triplets, as one image can be involved into several triplet units. To overcome this problem, we develop an effective triplet generation scheme and an optimized gradient descent algorithm, making the computational load mainly depend on the number of original images instead of the number of triplets. On several challenging databases, our approach achieves very promising results and outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. & 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.