Joint Person Re-identification and Camera Network Topology Inference in Multiple Cameras

Person re-identification is the task of recognizing or identifying a person across multiple views in multi-camera networks. Although there has been much progress in person re-identification, person re-identification in large-scale multi-camera networks still remains a challenging task because of the large spatio-temporal uncertainty and high complexity due to a large number of cameras and people. To handle these difficulties, additional information such as camera network topology should be provided, which is also difficult to automatically estimate, unfortunately. In this study, we propose a unified framework which jointly solves both person re-identification and camera network topology inference problems with minimal prior knowledge about the environments. The proposed framework takes general multi-camera network environments into account and can be applied to online person re-identification in large-scale multi-camera networks. In addition, to effectively show the superiority of the proposed framework, we provide a new person re-identification dataset with full annotations, named SLP, captured in the multi-camera network consisting of nine non-overlapping cameras. Experimental results using our person re-identification and public datasets show that the proposed methods are promising for both person re-identification and camera topology inference tasks.