Unsupervised person re-identification with locality-constrained Earth Mover's distance

Abstract

The difficult acquisition of labeled data and the misalignment of local matching are major obstacles to apply person re-identification in real scenarios. To alleviate these problems, we propose an unsupervised method, called locality-constrained Earth Mover's Distance (LC-EMD), to learn the optimal measure between image pairs. Specifically, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are learned as signatures. By imposing locality constraints, LC-EMD can naturally achieve partial matching between Gaussian components. Moreover, LC-EMD has the analytical solution which can be efficiently computed. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate LC-EMD is robust to misalignment and performs better than other unsupervised methods.