Person Transfer GAN to Bridge Domain Gap for Person Re-Identification
This work addresses the challenge of domain adaptation in person re-identification for surveillance and security applications, offering a method to reduce annotation costs, though it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN techniques.
The paper tackles the domain gap problem in person re-identification by introducing a new dataset, MSMT17, with 4,101 identities and 126,441 bounding boxes, and proposing a Person Transfer GAN (PTGAN) that substantially narrows the gap, enabling effective use of training data across different datasets.
Although the performance of person Re-Identification (ReID) has been significantly boosted, many challenging issues in real scenarios have not been fully investigated, e.g., the complex scenes and lighting variations, viewpoint and pose changes, and the large number of identities in a camera network. To facilitate the research towards conquering those issues, this paper contributes a new dataset called MSMT17 with many important features, e.g., 1) the raw videos are taken by an 15-camera network deployed in both indoor and outdoor scenes, 2) the videos cover a long period of time and present complex lighting variations, and 3) it contains currently the largest number of annotated identities, i.e., 4,101 identities and 126,441 bounding boxes. We also observe that, domain gap commonly exists between datasets, which essentially causes severe performance drop when training and testing on different datasets. This results in that available training data cannot be effectively leveraged for new testing domains. To relieve the expensive costs of annotating new training samples, we propose a Person Transfer Generative Adversarial Network (PTGAN) to bridge the domain gap. Comprehensive experiments show that the domain gap could be substantially narrowed-down by the PTGAN.