POP: Person Re-Identification Post-Rank Optimisation

Owing to visual ambiguities and disparities, person reidentification methods inevitably produce suboptimal ranklist, which still requires exhaustive human eyeballing to identify the correct target from hundreds of different likelycandidates. Existing re-identification studies focus on improving the ranking performance, but rarely look into the critical problem of optimising the time-consuming and error-prone post-rank visual search at the user end. In this study, we present a novel one-shot Post-rank OPtimisation (POP) method, which allows a user to quickly refine their search by either "one-shot" or a couple of sparse negative selections during a re-identification process. We conduct systematic behavioural studies to understand user's searching behaviour and show that the proposed method allows correct re-identification to converge 2.6 times faster than the conventional exhaustive search. Importantly, through extensive evaluations we demonstrate that the method is capable of achieving significant improvement over the state-of-the-art distance metric learning based ranking models, even with just "one shot" feedback optimisation, by as much as over 30% performance improvement for rank 1 reidentification on the VIPeR and i-LIDS datasets.