Large-scale person re-identification as retrieval

Key Smart City applications such as traffic management and public security rely heavily on the intelligent processing of video and image data, often in the form of visual retrieval tasks, such as person Re-IDentification (ReID) and vehicle re-identification. For these tasks, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been the dominant solution for the past decade, for their remarkable ability in learning discriminative features from images to boost retrieval performance. However, it is been discovered that DNNs are broadly vulnerable to maliciously constructed adversarial examples. By adding small perturbations to a query image, the returned retrieval results will be completely dissimilar from the query image. This poses serious challenges to vital systems in Smart City applications that depend on the DNN-based visual retrieval technology, as in the physical world, simple camouflage can be added on the subject (a few patches on the body or car), and turn the subject completely untrackable by person or vehicle Re-ID systems. To demonstrate the potential of such threats, this paper proposes a novel adversarial patch generative adversarial network (AP-GAN) to generate adversarial patches instead of modifying the entire image, which also causes the DNNs-based image retrieval models to return incorrect results. AP-GAN is trained in an unsupervised way that requires only a small amount of unlabeled data for training. Once trained, it produces query-specific perturbations for query images to form adversarial queries. Extensive experiments show that the AP-GAN achieves excellent attacking performance with various application scenarios that are based on deep features, including image retrieval, person ReID and vehicle ReID. The results of this study provide a warning that when deploying a DNNs-based image retrieval system, its security and robustness needs to be thoroughly considered.

The challenge of unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) lies in learning discriminative features without true labels. This paper formulates unsupervised person ReID as a multi-label classification task to progressively seek true labels. Our method starts by assigning each person image with a single-class label, then evolves to multi-label classification by leveraging the updated ReID model for label prediction. The label prediction comprises similarity computation and cycle consistency to ensure the quality of predicted labels. To boost the ReID model training efficiency in multi-label classification, we further propose the memory-based multi-label classification loss (MMCL). MMCL works with memory-based non-parametric classifier and integrates multi-label classification and single-label classification in a unified framework. Our label prediction and MMCL work iteratively and substantially boost the ReID performance. Experiments on several large-scale person ReID datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method in unsupervised person ReID. Our method also allows to use labeled person images in other domains. Under this transfer learning setting, our method also achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to retrieve a person of interest across multiple nonoverlapping cameras. In the last few years, the construction of aerial person Re-ID datasets has been appealing because visual surveillance through unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms has become very valuable in real-world scenarios. However, great differences are exhibited between the pedestrian images captured by ground cameras and those captured by UAVs. Person Re-ID methods based on ground person images have difficulty when performing Re-ID based on aerial person images. In this paper, we first propose a novel meta-transfer learning method for person Re-ID in aerial imagery; this approach trains a generalisable Re-ID model to learn discriminative feature representations for aerial person images. Specifically, a meta-learning strategy is introduced to study a feature extractor, and a transfer learning strategy is introduced to utilise and further improve the acquired meta-knowledge. To overcome the convergence speed and recognition accuracy reductions caused by the presence of difficult categories in the given dataset, we propose a learning strategy based on curriculum sampling that is harmonised with our meta-transfer learning framework. In addition, a new metric formulation of sample similarity is introduced based on Mahalanobis distance to improve the optimisation of the model. Extensive comparative evaluation experiments are conducted on the large-scale aerial Re-ID dataset, and the results obtained show that our method achieves a Rank-1 accuracy of 63.63 $$\%$$ and a mean average precision (mAP) of 38.02 $$\%$$ , demonstrating its potential for completing person Re-ID in aerial images. Ablation studies also validate that each component contributes to improving the performance of the model.

Person re-identification (ReID) is an important and practical task which identifies pedestrians across non-overlapping surveillance cameras based on their visual features. In general, ReID is an extremely challenging task due to complex background clutters, large pose variations and severe occlusions. To improve its performance, a robust and discriminative feature extraction methodology is particularly crucial. Recently, the feature alignment technique driven by human pose estimation, that is, matching two person images with their corresponding parts, increases the effectiveness of ReID to a certain extent. However, we argue that there are still a few problems among these methods such as imprecise handcrafted segmentation of body parts, and some improvements can be further achieved. In this paper, we present a novel framework called Mask-Guided Region Attention Network (MGRAN) for person ReID. MGRAN consists of two major components: Mask-guided Region Attention (MRA) and Multi-feature Alignment (MA). MRA aims to generate spatial attention masks and meanwhile mask out the background clutters and occlusions. Moreover, the generated masks are utilized for region-level feature alignment in the MA module. We then evaluate the proposed method on three public datasets, including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and CUHK03. Extensive experiments with ablation analysis show the effectiveness of this method.

Person Re-IDentification (Re-ID) is a critical technology to identify a target person from captured person images by surveillance cameras. However, person Re-ID has triggered great concerns of personal image privacy. Although the law (e.g., GDPR) has stipulated person images are personal private data, there is no an efficient solution to tackle the image privacy concern for person Re-ID. To this end, we propose FREED, the first system solution for privacy-preserving person Re-ID, which supports the state-of-the-art person Re-ID operations on encrypted feature vectors of person images. To handle the encryption of feature vectors effectively and enable person Re-ID operations on encrypted feature vectors efficiently, FREED develops a suite of batch secure computing protocols based on a twin-server architecture and the threshold Paillier cryptosystem. We demonstrate our secure computing protocols are more efficient than existing protocols and FREED achieves a precision equal to the state-of-the-art plaintext method.

Two-phase self-supervised pretraining for object re-identification

In recent years, secure image archival and retrieval model in cloud computing (CC) received significant attention to ensure data confidentiality and secured data transmission among cloud server and clients cloud storage and users. Traditional secure image retrieval (IR) techniques are not applicable to adapt with a large-scale IR in cloud environment. In order to overcome these issues, this article introduces an effective secure IR scheme using Inception with ResNet v2 (SIRS-IR) and Multiple Share Creation (MSC) scheme. The proposed method uses Inception with ResNet v2 model based feature extraction process. At the same time, the MSC process is utilized for multiple share generation and then encryption of shares takes place using double chaotic logistic map (DLCM) technique. Besides, the encrypted shares and the respective feature vectors are saved in the cloud server with the corresponding image identification number. During the IR process for the applied QI, the SIRS-IR model extracts the feature vectors and performs similarity measurement to retrieve the related images from the database interms of encrypted shares. Finally, the share decryption process is carried out for the reconstruction of original images with no loss of quality. Extensive experimentations were performed to verify the retrieval performance and image quality of the reconstructed images using Corel10K dataset. The obtained results stated that the presented SIRS-IR model is found to be superior to other methods in a considerable way.

Person reidentification (Re-ID) matches images of the same person captured in disjoint camera views and at different times. To obtain a reliable similarity measurement between images, manually annotating a large amount of pairwise cross-camera-view person images is deemed necessary. However, this kind of annotation is both costly and impractical for efficiently deploying a Re-ID system to a completely new scenario, a new setting of nonoverlapping camera views between which person images are to be matched. To solve this problem, we consider utilizing other existing person images captured in other scenarios to help the Re-ID system in a target (new) scenario, provided that a few samples are captured under the new scenario. More specifically, we tackle this problem by jointly learning the similarity measurements for Re-ID in different scenarios in an asymmetric way. To model the joint learning, we consider that the Re-ID models share certain component across tasks. A distinct consideration in our multitask modeling is to extract the discriminant shared component that reduces the cross-task data overlap in the shared latent space during the joint learning, so as to enhance the target inter-class separation in the shared latent space. For this purpose, we propose to maximize the cross-task data discrepancy on the shared component during asymmetric multitask learning (MTL), along with maximizing the local inter-class variation and minimizing local intra-class variation on all tasks. We call our proposed method the constrained asymmetric multitask discriminant component analysis (cAMT-DCA). We show that cAMT-DCA can be solved by a simple eigen decomposition with a closed form, getting rid of any iterative learning used in most conventional MTL analyses. The experimental results show that the proposed transfer model gains a clear improvement against the related nontransfer and general multitask person Re-ID models.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has become increasingly popular in vision community. Many previous works rely on either feature representation learning and/or metric learning. Different from classical methods, we find that some text in images could be considered as a key cue for differentiating persons under some circumstances (e.g., racing bib number of marathon participants). Based on this observation, we propose to simplify the person Re-ID problem into an end-to-end text recognition problem. Thanks to many powerful state-of-the-art text recognition systems, we can largely improve the efficiency and accuracy of person re-identification in such circumstances. Moreover, we collect a dataset consisting of 9706 marathon images and propose an appropriate measurement to benchmark person identification. Our work provides a promising perspective to person Re-ID and end-to-end text recognition fields, showing also high potentials for video surveillance and image retrieval.

Given images of a person, person re- identification (Person ReID) techniques aim to find images of the same person from previously collected images. Because of large data sets of person images and the advance of deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) successfully boost the accuracy of Person ReID algorithms, but it can be difficult to explain and to troubleshoot issues due to the complexity of CNNs. In this paper, we present a visualization-based approach to understand a CNN-based Person ReID algorithm. As Person ReID algorithms are often designed to map images of the same person into similar feature vectors, given two images, we design an algorithm to estimate how much each element in a CNN layer contributes to the similarity between their feature vectors. Based on the estimation, we build a visualization tool to interactively locate and visualize the activation of highly-contributing elements, other than manually examining all. Our visualization tool also supports various user interaction widgets to explore a Person ReID data set, locate difficult cases, and analyze the reason behind their similarities. We show a use case with our tool to understand and troubleshoot issues in a CNN-based Person ReID algorithm.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) systems aim to identify a person appeared in non-overlapping cameras. However, a sufficient amount of pairwise cross-camera-view person images are often not available in a new scenario. Transfer learning can assist the new Re-ID system through leveraging knowledge from other related scenarios. Since the images from existed scenarios may not be the exact representative samples, how to learn a robust transfer Re-ID model with limited labeled person images is still a challenge so far. To solve this problem, a novel cross-domain transfer person Re-ID via topology properties preserved local Fisher discriminant analysis (TPPLFDA) method is proposed in this paper. Making an assumption that all person images in the new and related scenarios share common manifold, TPPLFDA projects all cross-domain images into a low dimensional linear subspace, while preserves the topology properties according to the geodesic distances on manifold. Then, multiple cross-domain datasets as source domains are considered and kernel TPPLFDA for multi-source domain transfer is proposed, so that TPPLFDA can handle more complex cross-domain transfer Re-ID tasks. Extensive experiments on several transfer Re-ID datasets show that TPPLFDA is effective.

Adaptive Attention-Aware Network for unsupervised person re-identification

Person reidentification (Re-ID) benefits greatly from the accurate annotations of existing data sets (e.g., CUHK03 and Market-1501), which are quite expensive because each image in these data sets has to be assigned with a proper label. In this work, we ease the annotation of Re-ID by replacing the accurate annotation with inaccurate annotation, i.e., we group the images into bags in terms of time and assign a bag-level label for each bag. This greatly reduces the annotation effort and leads to the creation of a large-scale Re-ID benchmark called SYSU- 30k . The new benchmark contains 30k individuals, which is about 20 times larger than CUHK03 (1.3k individuals) and Market-1501 (1.5k individuals), and 30 times larger than ImageNet (1k categories). It sums up to 29606918 images. Learning a Re-ID model with bag-level annotation is called the weakly supervised Re-ID problem. To solve this problem, we introduce a differentiable graphical model to capture the dependencies from all images in a bag and generate a reliable pseudolabel for each person's image. The pseudolabel is further used to supervise the learning of the Re-ID model. Compared with the fully supervised Re-ID models, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on SYSU- 30k and other data sets. The code, data set, and pretrained model will be available at https://github.com/wanggrun/SYSU-30k.

Fully-automated person re-identification in multi-camera surveillance system with a robust kernel descriptor and effective shadow removal method

Abstract. Person Re-Identification (Re-ID) is the task of matching the same person in multiple images captured by different cameras. Recently deep learning-based Re-ID algorithms demonstrated an exciting progress for terrestrial-based cameras, still, person Re-ID in aerial images poses multiple challenges including occlusion of human feature parts, image distortion, and dynamic camera location. In this paper, we propose a new Person Aerial Re-ID framework Robust to Occlusion and Thermal imagery (ParrotGAN). Our model is focused on cross-modality person Re-ID in aerial images. Furthermore, we collected a new large-scale synthetic multimodal AerialReID dataset with 30k images and 137 person ID. Our ParrotGAN model leverages two strategies to achieve robust performance in the task of person Re-ID in thermal and visible range. Firstly, we use a latent space of StyleGAN2 model to estimate the distance between two images of a person. Specifically, we project each real image into the latent space with a correspondent latent vector z. We use the distance between latent vectors to provide a Re-ID similarity metric. Secondly, we use a generative-adversarial network to translate a color image to a synthetic thermal image. We use synthetic image for a cross-modality Re-ID. We evaluate our ParrotGAN model and basleines on our AerialReID and PRAI-1581 datasets. The results of the evaluation are encouraging and demonstrate that our ParrotGAN model competes with baselines in visible range aerial person Re-ID and outperforms them in the cross-modality setting. We made our code and dataset publicly available.