View Confusion Feature Learning for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification is an important task in video surveillance that aims to associate people across camera views at different locations and time. View variability is always a challenging problem seriously degrading person re-identification performance. Most of the existing methods either focus on how to learn view invariant feature or how to combine view-wise features. In this paper, we mainly focus on how to learn view-invariant features by getting rid of view specific information through a view confusion learning mechanism. Specifically, we propose an end-to-end trainable framework, called View Confusion Feature Learning (VCFL), for person Re-ID across cameras. To the best of our knowledge, VCFL is originally proposed to learn view-invariant identity-wise features, and it is a kind of combination of view-generic and view-specific methods. Classifiers and feature centers are utilized to achieve view confusion. Furthermore, we extract sift-guided features by using bag-of-words model to help supervise the training of deep networks and enhance the view invariance of features. In experiments, our approach is validated on three benchmark datasets including CUHK01, CUHK03, and MARKET1501, which show the superiority of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art approaches.