Improving person re-identification by viewpoint cues

Re-identifying people in a network of cameras requires an invariant human representation. State of the art algorithms are likely to fail in real-world scenarios due to serious perspective changes. Most of existing approaches focus on invariant and discriminative features, while ignoring the body alignment issue. In this paper we propose 3 methods for improving the performance of person re-identification. We focus on eliminating perspective distortions by using 3D scene information. Perspective changes are minimized by affine transformations of cropped images containing the target (1). Further we estimate the human pose for (2) clustering data from a video stream and (3) weighting image features. The pose is estimated using 3D scene information and motion of the target. We validated our approach on a publicly available dataset with a network of 8 cameras. The results demonstrated significant increase in the re-identification performance over the state of the art.