Back-propagation of the Mahalanobis distance through a deep triplet learning model for person Re-Identification

Abstract

The automatization of the Re-Identification of an individual across different video-surveillance cameras poses a significant challenge due to the presence of a vast number of potential candidates with a similar appearance. This task requires the learning of discriminative features from person images and a distance metric to properly compare them and decide whether they belong to the same person or not. Nevertheless, the fact of acquiring images of the same person from different, distant and non-overlapping views produces changes in illumination, perspective, background, resolution and scale between the person’s representations, resulting in appearance variations that hamper his/her re-identification. This article focuses the feature learning on automatically finding discriminative descriptors able to reflect the dissimilarities mainly due to the changes in actual people appearance, independently from the variations introduced by the acquisition point. With that purpose, such variations have been implicitly embedded by the Mahalanobis distance. This article presents a learning algorithm to jointly model features and the Mahalanobis distance through a Deep Neural Re-Identification model. The Mahalanobis distance learning has been implemented as a novel neural layer, forming part of a Triplet Learning model that has been evaluated over PRID2011 dataset, providing satisfactory results.