Exemplar-Guided Similarity Learning on Polynomial Kernel Feature Map for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification is a crucial problem for video surveillance, aiming to discover the correct matches for a probe person image from a set of gallery person images. To directly describe the image pair, we present a novel organization of polynomial kernel feature map in a high dimensional feature space to break down the variability of positive person pairs. An exemplar-guided similarity function is built on the map, which consists of multiple sub-functions. Each sub-function is associated with an “exemplar” image being responsible for a particular type of image pair, thus excels at separating the persons with similar appearance. We formulate a unified learning problem including a relaxed loss term as well as two kinds of regularization strategies particularly designed for the feature map. The corresponding optimization algorithm jointly optimizes the coefficients of all the sub-functions and selects the proper exemplars for a better discrimination. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on six public datasets, where we thoroughly analyze the contribution of each component and verify the generalizability of our approach by cross-dataset experiments. Results show that the new method can achieve consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods.