Cross-domain transfer person re-identification via topology properties preserved local fisher discriminant analysis

Person re-identification (Re-ID) systems aim to identify a person appeared in non-overlapping cameras. However, a sufficient amount of pairwise cross-camera-view person images are often not available in a new scenario. Transfer learning can assist the new Re-ID system through leveraging knowledge from other related scenarios. Since the images from existed scenarios may not be the exact representative samples, how to learn a robust transfer Re-ID model with limited labeled person images is still a challenge so far. To solve this problem, a novel cross-domain transfer person Re-ID via topology properties preserved local Fisher discriminant analysis (TPPLFDA) method is proposed in this paper. Making an assumption that all person images in the new and related scenarios share common manifold, TPPLFDA projects all cross-domain images into a low dimensional linear subspace, while preserves the topology properties according to the geodesic distances on manifold. Then, multiple cross-domain datasets as source domains are considered and kernel TPPLFDA for multi-source domain transfer is proposed, so that TPPLFDA can handle more complex cross-domain transfer Re-ID tasks. Extensive experiments on several transfer Re-ID datasets show that TPPLFDA is effective.