Robust Pedestrian Detection for Semi-automatic Construction of a Crowded Person Re-Identification Dataset

The problem of re-identification of people in a crowd commonly arises in real application scenarios, yet it has received less attention than it deserves. To facilitate research focusing on this problem, we have embarked on constructing a new person re-identification dataset with many instances of crowded indoor and outdoor scenes. This paper proposes a two-stage robust method for pedestrian detection in a complex crowded background to provide bounding box annotations. The first stage is to generate pedestrian proposals using Faster R-CNN and locate each pedestrian using Non-maximum Suppression (NMS). Candidates in dense proposal regions are merged to identify crowd patches. We then apply a bottom-up human pose estimation method to detect individual pedestrians in the crowd patches. The locations of all subjects are achieved based on the bounding boxes from the two stages. The identity of the detected subjects throughout each video is then automatically annotated using multiple features and spatial-temporal clues. The experimental results on a crowded pedestrians dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.