A generalized EMD with body prior for pedestrian identification

In this paper, we present a generalized Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) for pedestrian identification with body prior. (i) The general configuration of body is a valuable cue for human identification. A model of body prior about the general configuration is pursued to describe body prior for every pedestrian. In addition, the spatial incompatibility is computed by Kullback–Leibler divergence according to the pursued model and embedded into the ground distance of EMD. (ii) Furthermore, we generalize EMD by assigning different weights to regions of body, which are learned based on maximum margin criterion to boost discriminative power for pedestrian identification. The experimental results show that the generalized EMD and body prior substantially improve performance on pedestrian identification and the proposed approach is comparable to the state-of-the-art performance.

► We consider the configuration of body as body prior, and take it as the spatial constraints for matching pedestrians.
► We generalize EMD by assigning different weights to regions of body, which are learned based on maximum margin criterion.
► The generalized EMD with body prior boosts discriminative power for pedestrian identification.