Multi-label CNN Based Pedestrian Attribute Learning for Soft Biometrics

Recently, pedestrian attributes like gender, age and clothing etc., have been used as soft biometric traits for recognizing people. Unlike existing methods that assume the independence of attributes during their prediction, we propose a multi-label convolutional neural network (MLCNN) to predict multiple attributes together in a unified framework. Firstly, a pedestrian image is roughly divided into multiple overlapping body parts, which are simultaneously integrated in the multi-label convolutional neural network. Secondly, these parts are filtered independently and aggregated in the cost layer. The cost function is a combination of multiple binary attribute classification cost functions. Moreover, we propose an attribute assisted person re-identification method, which fuses attribute distances and low-level feature distances between pairs of person images to improve person re-identification performance. Extensive experiments show: 1) the average attribute classification accuracy of the proposed method is 5.2% and 9.3% higher than the SVM-based method on three public databases, VIPeR and GRID, respectively; 2) the proposed attribute assisted person re-identification method is superior to existing approaches.