Person Reidentification Using Deep Convnets With Multitask Learning

Person reidentification involves recognizing a person across nonoverlapping camera views, with different pose, illumination, and camera characteristics. We propose to tackle this problem by training a deep convolutional network to represent a person's appearance as a low-dimensional feature vector that is invariant to common appearance variations encountered in the reidentification problem. Specifically, a Siamese network architecture is used to train a feature extraction network using pairs of similar and dissimilar images. We show that the use of a novel multitask learning objective is crucial for regularizing the network parameters in order to prevent overfitting due to the small size of the training data set. We complement the verification task, which is at the heart of reidentification, by training the network to jointly perform verification and identification and to recognize attributes related to the clothing and pose of the person in each image. In addition, we show that our proposed approach performs well even in the challenging cross-data set scenario, which may better reflect real-world expected performance.