Sparse Label Smoothing Regularization for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (re-id) is a cross-camera retrieval task which establishes a correspondence between images of a person from multiple cameras. Deep learning methods have been successfully applied to this problem and have achieved impressive results. However, these methods require a large amount of labeled training data. Currently, the labeled datasets in person re-id are limited in their scale and manual acquisition of such large-scale datasets from surveillance cameras is a tedious and labor-intensive task. In this paper, we propose a framework that performs intelligent data augmentation and assigns the partial smoothing label to generated data. Our approachfirst exploits the clustering property of existing person re-id datasets to create groups of similar objects that model cross-view variations. Each group is then used to generate realistic images through adversarial training. Our aim is to emphasize the feature similarity between generated samples and the original samples. Finally, we assign a non-uniform label distribution to the generated samples and define a regularized loss function for training. The proposed approach tackles two problems 1) how to efficiently use the generated data and 2) how to address the over-smoothness problem found in current regularization methods. The extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets show that our regularization method significantly improves the re-id accuracy compared to existing methods.