An Ensemble Color Model for Human Re-identification

Appearance-based human re-identification is challenging due to different camera characteristics, varying lighting conditions, pose variations across camera views, etc. Recent studies have revealed that color information plays a critical role on performance. However, two problems remain unclear: (1) how do different color descriptors perform under the same scene in re-identification problem? and (2) how can we combine these descriptors without losing their invariance property and distinctiveness power? In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble model that combines different color descriptors in the decision level through metric learning. Experiments show that the proposed system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on two challenging datasets (VIPeR and PRID 450S). We have improved the Rank 1 recognition rate on VIPeR dataset by 8.7%.