A unified framework for automated person re-identification

Along with the strong development of camera networks, a video analysis system has been become more and more popular and has been applied in various practical applications. In this paper, we focus on person re-identification (person ReID) task that is a crucial step of video analysis systems. The purpose of person ReID is to associate multiple images of a given person when moving in a non-overlapping camera network. Many efforts have been made to person ReID. However, most of studies on person ReID only deal with well-alignment bounding boxes which are detected manually and considered as the perfect inputs for person ReID. In fact, when building a fully automated person ReID system the quality of the two previous steps that are person detection and tracking may have a strong effect on the person ReID performance. The contribution of this paper are two-folds. First, a unified framework for person ReID based on deep learning models is proposed. In this framework, the coupling of a deep neural network for person detection and a deep-learning-based tracking method is used. Besides, features extracted from an improved ResNet architecture are proposed for person representation to achieve a higher ReID accuracy. Second, our self-built dataset is introduced and employed for evaluation of all three steps in the fully automated person ReID framework.