Online joint multi-metric adaptation from frequent sharing-subset mining for person re-identification

Person Re-IDentification (P-RID), as an instance-level recognition problem, still remains challenging in computer vision community. Many P-RID works aim to learn faithful and discriminative features/metrics from offline training data and directly use them for the unseen online testing data. However, their performance is largely limited due to the severe data shifting issue between training and testing data. Therefore, we propose an online joint multi-metric adaptation model to adapt the offline learned P-RID models for the online data by learning a series of metrics for all the sharing-subsets. Each sharing-subset is obtained from the proposed novel frequent sharing-subset mining module and contains a group of testing samples which share strong visual similarity relationships to each other. Unlike existing online P-RID methods, our model simultaneously takes both the sample-specific discriminant and the set-based visual similarity among testing samples into consideration so that the adapted multiple metrics can refine the discriminant of all the given testing samples jointly via a multi-kernel late fusion framework. Our proposed model is generally suitable to any offline learned P-RID baselines for online boosting, the performance improvement by our model is not only verified by extensive experiments on several widely-used P-RID benchmarks (CUHK03, Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17) and state-of-the-art P-RID baselines but also guaranteed by the provided in-depth theoretical analyses.