Viewpoint and Scale Consistency Reinforcement for UAV Vehicle Re-Identification

Abstract

This paper studies vehicle ReID in aerial videos taken by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Compared with existing vehicle ReID tasks performed with fixed surveillance cameras, UAV vehicle ReID is still under-explored and could be more challenging, e.g., aerial videos have dynamic and complex backgrounds, different vehicles show similar appearance, and the same vehicle commonly show distinct viewpoints and scales. To facilitate the research on UAV vehicle ReID, this paper contributes a novel dataset called UAV-VeID. UAV-VeID contains 41,917 images of 4601 vehicles captured by UAVs, where each vehicle has multiple images taken from different viewpoints. UAV-VeID also includes a large-scale distractor set to encourage the research on efficient ReID schemes. Compared with existing vehicle ReID datasets, UAV-VeID exhibits substantial variances in viewpoints and scales of vehicles, thus requires more robust features. To alleviate the negative effects of those variances, this paper also proposes a viewpoint adversarial training strategy and a multi-scale consensus loss to promote the robustness and discriminative power of learned deep features. Extensive experiments on UAV-VeID show our approach outperforms recent vehicle ReID algorithms. Moreover, our method also achieves competitive performance compared with recent works on existing vehicle ReID datasets including VehicleID, VeRi-776 and VERI-Wild.