Interactive retrieval of targets for wide area surveillance

We address the problem of interactive search for a target of interest in surveillance imagery. Our solution consists of iteratively learning a distance metric for retrieval, based on user feedback. The approach employs (retrieval) rank based constraints and convex optimization to efficiently learn the distance metric. The algorithm uses both user labeled and unlabeled examples in the learning process. The method is fast enough for a new metric to be learned interactively for each target query. In order to reduce the burden on the user, a model-independent active learning method is used to select key examples, for response solicitation. This leads to a significant reduction in the number of user-interactions required for retrieving the target of interest. The proposed method is evaluated on challenging pedestrian and vehicle data sets, and compares favorably to the state of the art in target re-acquisition algorithms.