A feature-based approach to people re-identification using skeleton keypoints

In this paper we propose a novel methodology for people re-identification based on skeletal information. Features are evaluated on the skeleton joints and a highly distinctive and compact feature-based signature is generated for each user by concatenating descriptors of all visible joints. We compared a number of state-of-the-art 2D and 3D feature descriptors to be used with our signature on two newly acquired public datasets for people re-identification with RGB-D sensors. Moreover, we tested our approach against the best re-identification methods in the literature and on a widely used public video surveillance dataset. Our approach proved to be robust to strong illumination changes and occlusions. It achieved very high performance also on low resolution images, overcoming state-of-the-art methods in terms of recognition accuracy and efficiency. These features make our approach particularly suited for mobile robotics.