Efficient Online Local Metric Adaptation via Negative Samples for Person Re-Identification

Many existing person re-identification (PRID) methods typically attempt to train a faithful global metric offline to cover the enormous visual appearance variations, so as to directly use it online on various probes for identity matching. However, their need for a huge set of positive training pairs is very demanding in practice. In contrast to these methods, this paper advocates a different paradigm: part of the learning can be performed online but with nominal costs, so as to achieve online metric adaptation for different input probes. A major challenge here is that no positive training pairs are available for the probe anymore. By only exploiting easily-available negative samples, we propose a novel solution to achieve local metric adaptation effectively and efficiently. For each probe at the test time, it learns a strictly positive semi-definite dedicated local metric. Comparing to offline global metric learning, its computational cost is negligible. The insight of this new method is that the local hard negative samples can actually provide tight constraints to fine tune the metric locally. This new local metric adaptation method is generally applicable, as it can be used on top of any global metric to enhance its performance. In addition, this paper gives in-depth theoretical analysis and justification of the new method. We prove that our new method guarantees the reduction of the classification error asymptotically, and prove that it actually learns the optimal local metric to best approximate the asymptotic case by a finite number of training data. Extensive experiments and comparative studies on almost all major benchmarks (VIPeR, QMUL GRID, CUHK Campus, CUHK03 and Market-1501) have confirmed the effectiveness and superiority of our method.