Improving triplet-wise training of convolutional neural network for vehicle re-identification

Vehicle re-identification (re-id) plays an important role in the automatic analysis of the drastically increasing urban surveillance videos. Similar to the other image retrieval problems, vehicle re-id suffers from the difficulties caused by various poses of vehicles, diversified illuminations, and complicated environments. Triplet-wise training of convolutional neural network (CNN) has been studied to address these challenges, where the CNN is adopted to automate the feature extraction from images, and the training adopts triplets of (query, positive example, negative example) to capture the relative similarity between them to learn representative features. The traditional triplet-wise training is weakly constrained and thus fails to achieve satisfactory results. We propose to improve the triplet-wise training at two aspects: first, a stronger constraint namely classification-oriented loss is augmented with the original triplet loss; second, a new triplet sampling method based on pairwise images is designed. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods that achieve superior performance than the state-of-the-arts on two vehicle re-id datasets, which are derived from real-world urban surveillance videos.