In this paper, we propose a novel method called AlignedReID that extracts a global feature which is jointly learned with local features. Global feature learning benefits greatly from local feature learning, which performs an alignment matching by calculating the shortest path between two sets of local features, without requiring extra supervision. After the joint learning, we only keep the global feature to compute the similarities between images. Our method achieves rank-1 accuracy of 94.4 on Market1501 and 97.8 on CUHK03, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. We also evaluate human-level performance and demonstrate that our method is the first to surpass human-level performance on Market1501 and CUHK03, two widely used Person ReID datasets.
@cite_43: Pedestrian misalignment, which mainly arises from detector errors and pose variations, is a critical problem for a robust person re-identification (re-ID) system. With bad alignment, the background noise will significantly compromise the feature learning and matching process. To address this problem, this paper introduces the pose invariant embedding (PIE) as a pedestrian descriptor. First, in order to align pedestrians to a standard pose, the PoseBox structure is introduced, which is generated through pose estimation followed by affine transformations. Second, to reduce the impact of pose estimation errors and information loss during PoseBox construction, we design a PoseBox fusion (PBF) CNN architecture that takes the original image, the PoseBox, and the pose estimation confidence as input. The proposed PIE descriptor is thus defined as the fully connected layer of the PBF network for the retrieval task. Experiments are conducted on the Market-1501, CUHK03, and VIPeR datasets. We show that PoseBox alone yields decent re-ID accuracy and that when integrated in the PBF network, the learned PIE descriptor produces competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.
@cite_31: The huge variance of human pose and the misalignment of detected human images significantly increase the difficulty of person Re-Identification (Re-ID). Moreover, efficient Re-ID systems are required to cope with the massive visual data being produced by video surveillance systems. Targeting to solve these problems, this work proposes a Global-Local-Alignment Descriptor (GLAD) and an efficient indexing and retrieval framework, respectively. GLAD explicitly leverages the local and global cues in human body to generate a discriminative and robust representation. It consists of part extraction and descriptor learning modules, where several part regions are first detected and then deep neural networks are designed for representation learning on both the local and global regions. A hierarchical indexing and retrieval framework is designed to eliminate the huge redundancy in the gallery set, and accelerate the online Re-ID procedure. Extensive experimental results show GLAD achieves competitive accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Our retrieval framework significantly accelerates the online Re-ID procedure without loss of accuracy. Therefore, this work has potential to work better on person Re-ID tasks in real scenarios.
@cite_50: 
Recently, aligning local features by pose estimation has become a popular approach. For instance, pose invariant embedding (PIE) aligns pedestrians to a standard pose to reduce the impact of pose @cite_43 variation. A Global-Local-Alignment Descriptor (GLAD) @cite_31 does not directly align pedestrians, but rather detects key pose points and extracts local features from corresponding regions. SpindleNet @cite_50 uses a region proposed network (RPN) to generate several body regions, gradually combining the response maps from adjacent body regions at different stages. These methods require extra pose annotation and have to deal with the errors introduced by pose estimation.