Person re-identification by pose priors

The person re-identification problem is a well known retrieval task that requires finding a person of interest in a network of cameras. In a real-world scenario, state of the art algorithms are likely to fail due to serious perspective and pose changes as well as variations in lighting conditions across the camera network. The most effective approaches try to cope with all these changes by applying metric learning tools to find a transfer function between a camera pair. Unfortunately, this transfer function is usually dependent on the camera pair and requires labeled training data for each camera. This might be unattainable in a large camera network. In this paper, instead of learning the transfer function that addresses all appearance changes, we propose to learn a generic metric pool that only focuses on pose changes. This pool consists of metrics, each one learned to match a specific pair of poses. Automatically estimated poses determine the proper metric, thus improving matching. We show that metrics learned using a single camera improve the matching across the whole camera network, providing a scalable solution. We validated our approach on a publicly available dataset demonstrating increase in the re-identification performance.