Improved Bag-of-Words Model for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (person re-id) aims to match observations on pedestrians from different cameras. It is a challenging task in real word surveillance systems and draws extensive attention from the community. Most existing methods are based on supervised learning which requires a large number of labeled data. In this paper, we develop a robust unsupervised learning approach for person re-id. We propose an improved Bag-of-Words (iBoW) model to describe and match pedestrians under different camera views. The proposed descriptor does not require any re-id labels, and is robust against pedestrian variations. Experiments show the proposed iBoW descriptor outperforms other unsupervised methods. By combination with efficient metric learning algorithms, we obtained competitive accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art methods on person re-identification benchmarks, including VIPeR, PRID450S, and Market1501.