Distance penalization and fusion for person re-identification

This paper presents a novel person re-identification framework based on data fusion. The pipeline of the proposed method is composed of two stages. First, a metric learning paradigm is applied on a bunch of distinct feature extractors to produce an ensemble of estimated distance measures, which are subsequently penalized according to their confidence in evidencing the correct matches from the false ones, and averaged as to draw a final decision. Second, the close persons from the gallery are selected based on the previously fused distance estimates, and utilized to build a dictionary as to reconstruct a given probe pattern. Evaluated on benchmark datasets, the proposed framework advances the state-of-the-art by interesting margins. In particular, Rank1 gains amounting to about 12%, 1%, 6%, and 12%, were scored on VIPeR, CAVIAR4REID, iLIDS, and 3DPeS, respectively.