Recently, unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID) has gained a lot of attention, since it does not depend on intensive manual annotation and is more practical to deploy in the real world directly. An inspiring method, the Bottom-up Clustering (BUC), achieves the state-of-the-art among unsupervised re-ID methods and outperforms most semi-supervised and transfer learning algorithms. The BUC utilizes the minimum-distance between samples in different clusters as the merging criterion, and the number of samples as the penalization term. However, the minimum-distance criterion only considers one pair of samples between two clusters, and cannot exploit the information of all samples in clusters. The penalization, intuitively, is unsuitable for the dataset with irregular sample quantity. To relieve this problem, we propose a deviation based clustering re-ID approach, which takes the inter- and intra-cluster deviation into consideration. The inter-cluster deviation denotes the increase of deviation after merging two clusters, considering all samples between the two clusters to merge. The intra-cluster deviation, working as penalization, denotes the distance between samples and the center in each cluster, and thus it can help to mitigate the side-effect of irregular datasets. The two criterions can reflect the inter- and intra- dispersion precisely. Based on these criterions, we group similar samples into clusters and utilize the cluster identities as a pseudo annotation to train our model. To evaluate our proposed approach, we implement abundant experiments on two popular re-ID datasets, where one has irregular sample quality (i.e., Market-1501) and the other has regular sample quality (i.e., DukeMTMC-reID). Evaluations show that our method outperforms BUC by 1.8% on Rank-1 (i.e., 68.0% accuracy) and 2.1% on mAP (i.e., 40.4% accuracy) for the Market-1501 dataset, and well maintains the benefit of BUC on the DukeMIMC-reID dataset with the accuracy of 47.8% in Rank-1 and 27.0% in mAP.
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