Combining human parsing with analytical feature extraction and ranking schemes for high-generalization person reidentification

Abstract

Person reidentification (re-ID) has been receiving increasing attention in recent years due to its importance for both science and society. Machine learning and particularly Deep Learning (DL) has become the main re-id tool that allowed researches to achieve unprecedented accuracy levels on benchmark datasets. However, there is a known problem of poor generalization of DL models. That is, models trained to achieve high accuracy on one dataset perform poorly on other ones and require re-training. To address this issue, we present a model without trainable parameters which shows great potential for high generalization. It combines a fully analytical feature extraction and similarity ranking scheme with DL-based human parsing used to obtain the initial subregion classification. We show that such combination to a high extent eliminates the drawbacks of existing analytical methods. We use interpretable color and texture features which have humanreadable similarity measures associated with them. To verify the proposed method we conduct experiments on Market1501 and CUHK03 datasets achieving competitive rank-1 accuracy comparable with that of DL-models. Most importantly we show that our method achieves 63.9% and 93.5% rank-1 cross-domain accuracy when applied to transfer learning tasks. It is significantly higher than previously reported 30-50% transfer accuracy. We discuss the potential ways of adding new features to further improve the model. We also show the advantage of interpretable features for constructing human-generated queries from verbal description to conduct search without a query image.