Evaluation of local features for person re-identification in image sequences

In this paper we present a comparative study of local features for the task of person (re) identification. A combination of state of the art interest point detectors and descriptors is evaluated. The experiments are performed on a novel dataset which we make publicly available for future research in this area. The results indicate that there are significant differences between the evaluated descriptors, with GLOH and SIFT outperforming both Shape Context and SURF descriptors. The evaluated interest point descriptors perform equally well, with a slight advantage for the Hessian-Laplace detector. The Harris-Affine and Hessian-Affine affine invariant region detectors do not provide any performance advantage and therefore do not justify their additional computational expense.