This paper aims at a newly raising task in visual surveillance: re-identifying people at a distance by matching body information, given several reference examples. Most of existing works solve this task by matching a reference template with the target individual, but often suffer from large human appearance variability (e.g. different poses views, illumination) and high false positives in matching caused by conjunctions, occlusions or surrounding clutters. Addressing these problems, we construct a simple yet expressive template from a few reference images of a certain individual, which represents the body as an articulated assembly of compositional and alternative parts, and propose an effective matching algorithm with cluster sampling. This algorithm is designed within a candidacy graph whose vertices are matching candidates (i.e. a pair of source and target body parts), and iterates in two steps for convergence. (i) It generates possible partial matches based on compatible and competitive relations among body parts. (ii) It confirms the partial matches to generate a new matching solution, which is accepted by the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) mechanism. In the experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of our approach on three public databases compared to existing methods.
In this paper, we present an appearance-based method for person re-identification. It consists in the extraction of features that model three complementary aspects of the human appearance: the overall chromatic content, the spatial arrangement of colors into stable regions, and the presence of recurrent local motifs with high entropy. All this information is derived from different body parts, and weighted opportunely by exploiting symmetry and asymmetry perceptual principles. In this way, robustness against very low resolution, occlusions and pose, viewpoint and illumination changes is achieved. The approach applies to situations where the number of candidates varies continuously, considering single images or bunch of frames for each individual. It has been tested on several public benchmark datasets (ViPER, iLIDS, ETHZ), gaining new state-of-the-art performances. In many surveillance applications it is desirable to determine if a given individual has been previously observed over a network of cameras. This is the person reidentification problem. This paper focuses on reidentification algorithms that use the overall appearance of an individual as opposed to passive biometrics such as face and gait. Person reidentification approaches have two aspects: (i) establish correspondence between parts, and (ii) generate signatures that are invariant to variations in illumination, pose, and the dynamic appearance of clothing. A novel spatiotemporal segmentation algorithm is employed to generate salient edgels that are robust to changes in appearance of clothing. The invariant signatures are generated by combining normalized color and salient edgel histograms. Two approaches are proposed to generate correspondences: (i) a model based approach that fits an articulated model to each individual to establish a correspondence map, and (ii) an interest point operator approach that nominates a large number of potential correspondences which are evaluated using a region growing scheme. Finally, the approaches are evaluated on a 44 person database across 3 disparate views. We propose a novel methodology for re-identification, based on Pictorial Structures (PS). Whenever face or other biometric information is missing, humans recognize an individual by selectively focusing on the body parts, looking for part-to-part correspondences. We want to take inspiration from this strategy in a re-identification context, using PS to achieve this objective. For single image re-identification, we adopt PS to localize the parts, extract and match their descriptors. When multiple images of a single individual are available, we propose a new algorithm to customize the fit of PS on that specific person, leading to what we call a Custom Pictorial Structure (CPS). CPS learns the appearance of an individual, improving the localization of its parts, thus obtaining more reliable visual characteristics for re-identification. It is based on the statistical learning of pixel attributes collected through spatio-temporal reasoning. The use of PS and CPS leads to state-of-the-art results on all the available public benchmarks, and opens a fresh new direction for research on re-identification.