A New Date-Balanced Method Based on Adaptive Asymmetric and Diversity Regularization in Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (person re-ID) is a challenging task which aims at spotting same persons among disjoint camera views. It has certainly generated a lot of attention in the field of computer vision, but it remains a challenging task due to the complexity of person appearances from different camera views. To solve this challenging problem, many excellent methods have been proposed, especially metric learning-based algorithms. However, most of them suffer from the problem of data imbalance. To solve this problem, in the paper we proposed a new data-balanced method and named it Enhanced Metric Learning (EML) based on adaptive asymmetric and diversity regularization for person re-ID. Metric learning is important for person re-ID because it can eliminate the negative effects caused by camera differences to a certain extent. But most metric learning approaches often neglect the problem of data imbalance caused by too many negative samples but few positive samples. And they often treat all negative samples the same as positive ones, which can lead to the loss of important information. Our approach pays different attention to the positive samples and negative ones. Firstly, we classified negative samples into three groups adaptively, and then paid different attention to them using adaptive asymmetric strategy. By treating samples differently, the proposed method can better exploit the discriminative information between positive and negative samples. Furthermore, we also proposed to impose a diversity regularizer to avoid over-fitting when the training sets are small or medium-sized. Finally, we designed a series of experiments on four challenging databases (VIPeR, PRID450S, CUHK01 and GRID), to compare with some excellent metric learning methods. Experimental results show that the rank-1 matching rate of the proposed method has outperformed the state-of-the-art by 3.64%, 4.2%, 3.13% and 2.83% on the four databases, respectively.