Person Re-Identification by Robust Canonical Correlation Analysis

Person re-identification is the task to match people in surveillance cameras at different time and location. Due to significant view and pose change across non-overlapping cameras, directly matching data from different views is a challenging issue to solve. In this letter, we propose a robust canonical correlation analysis (ROCCA) to match people from different views in a coherent subspace. Given a small training set as in most re-identification problems, direct application of canonical correlation analysis (CCA) may lead to poor performance due to the inaccuracy in estimating the data covariance matrices. The proposed ROCCA with shrinkage estimation and smoothing technique is simple to implement and can robustly estimate the data covariance matrices with limited training samples. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets show that the proposed ROCCA outperforms regularized CCA (RCCA), and achieves state-of-the-art matching results for person re-identification as compared to the most recent methods.