Person Re-identification in Aerial Imagery

Nowadays, with the rapid development of consumer Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), visual surveillance by utilizing the UAV platform has been very attractive. Most of the research works for UAV captured visual data are mainly focused on the tasks of object detection and tracking. However, limited attention has been paid to the task of person Re-identification (ReID) which has been widely studied in ordinary surveillance cameras with fixed emplacements. In this paper, to facilitate the research of person ReID in aerial imagery, we collect a large scale airborne person ReID dataset named as Person ReID for Aerial Imagery (PRAI-1581), which consists of 39,461 images of 1581 person identities. The images of the dataset are captured by two DJI consumer UAVs flying at an altitude ranging from 20 to 60 meters above the ground, which covers most of the real UAV surveillance scenarios. In addition, we propose to utilize subspace pooling with SVD of convolution feature maps to represent the input person images. The proposed method can learn a discriminative and compact feature descriptor for ReID in aerial imagery and can be trained via an end-to-end fashion efficiently. We conduct extensive experiments on our dataset and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.