See the Forest for the Trees: Joint Spatial and Temporal Recurrent Neural Networks for Video-Based Person Re-Identification

Zhen Zhou, Yan Huang, Wei Wang, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 4747-4756

Surveillance cameras have been widely used in different scenes. Accordingly, a demanding need is to recognize a person under different cameras, which is called person re-identification. This topic has gained increasing interests in computer vision recently. However, less attention has been paid to video-based approaches, compared with image-based ones. Two steps are usually involved in previous approaches, namely feature learning and metric learning. But most of the existing approaches only focus on either feature learning or metric learning. Meanwhile, many of them do not take full use of the temporal and spatial information. In this paper, we concentrate on video-based person re-identification and build an end-to-end deep neural network architecture to jointly learn features and metrics. The proposed method can automatically pick out the most discriminative frames in a given video by a temporal attention model. Moreover, it integrates the surrounding information at each location by a spatial recurrent model when measuring the similarity with another pedestrian video. That is, our method handles spatial and temporal information simultaneously in a unified manner. The carefully designed experiments on three public datasets show the effectiveness of each component of the proposed deep network, performing better in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.