Decentralized Text-Based Person Re-Identification in Multi-Camera Networks

Text-based person re-identification (re-ID) is an emerging research domain in multi-camera surveillance systems. It involves identifying individuals across different camera views using textual descriptions as queries. Although text-based person re-ID holds significant potential for surveillance systems, its practical applications are limited by the high computational demands of existing algorithms. This is because most state-of-the-art algorithms prioritize identification accuracy over resource efficiency. Therefore, surveillance systems based on existing algorithms rely heavily on centralized architectures, where a central application server aggregates videos from camera nodes, generates galleries from the videos, and performs person identification. However, such centralized systems face challenges in large-scale deployments, including scalability issues, high bandwidth utilization, and processing bottlenecks. This paper presents a decentralized approach to text-based person re-ID to overcome these limitations. First, it introduces U-TextReIDNet, a resource-efficient model designed to identify persons in multi-person images on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano embedded board. U-TextReIDNet achieves Top-1 accuracies of 54.02% on the CUHK-PEDES dataset and 38.45% on the RSTPReid dataset. With only 38.77 million parameters, U-TextReIDNet is significantly smaller than most existing text-based person re-ID models. Using U-TextReIDNet, we implement a decentralized system that distributes the person identification task across camera nodes, transmitting only videos containing persons of interest to the command station. Additionally, we developed a prototype of this decentralized system, and conducted performance and usability tests using real human subjects. The prototype successfully performs real-time person re-ID, reduces bandwidth utilization, improves system scalability, and eliminates processing bottlenecks.