Local feature extracted by the improved bag of features method for person re-identification

Abstract

Person re-identification is to recognize a pedestrian who has been observed at different places in monitoring system, which is done by computer automatically. Important practical significance can be found in this paper on improving the intelligence of monitoring system. There are two challenging problems needed to be solved for person re-identification, which is feature representation and matching. Designing a suitable feature representation method is both challenging and crucial. Ideally, the extracted features should be robust enough to cope with the various situations of the monitoring environment, such as posture difference, illumination changing, and shooting angle difference, etc. There are a lot of challenges for feature matching too, such as small sample size, inter-class confusion, and intra-class variation, etc. In order to meet these challenges, a new person re-identification scheme was put forward in this paper. The following three aspects would be used to describe it. First, an improved BOF feature extraction algorithm based on SURF was put forwarded, SURF algorithm extracts the preliminary feature descriptor and generates visual dictionary, so the influence factors such as illumination and scale invariants can be deal with. And then, covariance descriptor was adopted by the algorithm. It has high robustness, and matching accuracy can be improved too for the case of small sample. Finally, an effective classifier was designed by LIBSVM based on improved BOF algorithm, so the efficiency of the person re-identification algorithm can be improved. The proposed method was compared with the current mainstream algorithm through experiment, and it can be found through the experimental results that it is effective to solve the difficult problems for person re-identification.