Multi-label convolutional neural network based pedestrian attribute classification

Recently, pedestrian attributes like gender, age, clothing etc., have been used as soft biometric traits for recognizing people. Unlike existing methods that assume the independence of attributes during their prediction, we propose a multi-label convolutional neural network (MLCNN) to predict multiple attributes together in a unified framework. Firstly, a pedestrian image is roughly divided into multiple overlapping body parts, which are simultaneously integrated in the multi-label convolutional neural network. Secondly, these parts are filtered independently and aggregated in the cost layer. The cost function is a combination of multiple binary attribute classification cost functions. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the SVM based method on the PETA database.