Viewpoint-Aware Attentive Multi-View Inference for Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification (re-ID) has the huge potential to contribute to the intelligent video surveillance. However, it suffers from challenges that different vehicle identities with a similar appearance have little inter-instance discrepancy while one vehicle usually has large intra-instance differences under viewpoint and illumination variations. Previous methods address vehicle re-ID by simply using visual features from originally captured views and usually exploit the spatial-temporal information of the vehicles to refine the results. In this paper, we propose a Viewpoint-aware Attentive Multi-view Inference (VAMI) model that only requires visual information to solve the multi-view vehicle re-ID problem. Given vehicle images of arbitrary viewpoints, the VAMI extracts the single-view feature for each input image and aims to transform the features into a global multi-view feature representation so that pairwise distance metric learning can be better optimized in such a viewpoint-invariant feature space. The VAMI adopts a viewpoint-aware attention model to select core regions at different viewpoints and implement effective multi-view feature inference by an adversarial training architecture. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of each proposed component and illustrate that our approach achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art vehicle re-ID methods on two public datasets: VeRi and VehicleID.