Eliminating cross-camera bias for vehicle re-identification

Vehicle re-identification (reID) often requires to recognize a target vehicle in large datasets captured from multi-cameras. It plays an important role in the automatic analysis of the increasing urban surveillance videos, which has become a hot topic in recent years. However, the appearance of vehicle images is easily affected by the environment that various illuminations, different backgrounds and viewpoints, which leads to the large bias between different cameras. To address this problem, this paper proposes a cross-camera adaptation framework (CCA), which smooths the bias by exploiting the common space between cameras for all samples. CCA first transfers images from multi-cameras into one camera to reduce the impact of the illumination and resolution, which generates the samples with the similar distribution. Then, to eliminate the influence of background and focus on the valuable parts, we propose an attention alignment network (AANet) to learn powerful features for vehicle reID. Specially, in AANet, the spatial transfer network with attention module is introduced to locate a series of the most discriminative regions with high-attention weights and suppress the background. Moreover, comprehensive experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed CCA can achieve excellent performances on benchmark datasets VehicleID and VeRi-776.