Semi-supervised person re-identification using multi-view clustering

Abstract

Person Re-Identification (Re-Id) is a challenging task focusing on identifying the same person among disjoint camera views. A number of deep learning algorithms have been reported for this task in fully-supervised fashion which requires a large amount of labeled training data, while obtaining high quality labels for Re-Id is extremely time consuming. To address this problem, we propose a semi-supervised Re-Id framework by using only a small portion of labeled data and some additional unlabeled samples. This paper approaches the problem by constructing a set of heterogeneous Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) fine-tuned using the labeled portion, and then propagating the labels to the unlabeled portion for further fine-tuning the overall system. In this work, label estimation is a key component during the propagation process. We propose a novel multi-view clustering method, which integrates features of multiple heterogeneous CNNs to cluster and generate pseudo labels for unlabeled samples. Then we fine-tune each of the multiple heterogeneous CNNs by minimizing an identification loss and a verification loss simultaneously, using training data with both true labels and pseudo labels. The procedure is iterated until the estimation of pseudo labels no longer changes. Extensive experiments on three large-scale person Re-Id datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.