Structured deep hashing with convolutional neural networks for fast person re-identification

Given a pedestrian image as a query, the purpose of person re-identification is to identify the correct match from a large collection of gallery images depicting the same person captured by disjoint camera views. The critical challenge is how to construct a robust yet discriminative feature representation to capture the compounded variations in pedestrian appearance. To this end, deep learning methods have been proposed to extract hierarchical features against extreme variability of appearance. However, existing methods in this category generally neglect the efficiency in the matching stage whereas the searching speed of a re-identification system is crucial in real-world applications. In this paper, we present a novel deep hashing framework with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for fast person re-identification. Technically, we simultaneously learn both CNN features and hash functions to get robust yet discriminative features and similarity-preserving hash codes. Thereby, person re-identification can be resolved by efficiently computing and ranking the Hamming distances between images. A structured loss function defined over positive pairs and hard negatives is proposed to formulate a novel optimization problem so that fast convergence and more stable optimized solution can be attained. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks CUHK03 (Li et al., 2014) and Market-1501 (Zheng et al., 2015) show that the proposed deep architecture is efficacy over state-of-the-arts.