Early active learning with pairwise constraint for person re-identification

Research on person re-identification (re-id) has attached much attention in the machine learning field in recent years. With sufficient labeled training data, supervised re-id algorithm can obtain promising performance. However, producing labeled data for training supervised re-id models is an extremely challenging and time-consuming task because it requires every pair of images across no-overlapping camera views to be labeled. Moreover, in the early stage of experiments, when labor resources are limited, only a small number of data can be labeled. Thus, it is essential to design an effective algorithm to select the most representative samples. This is referred as early active learning or early stage experimental design problem. The pairwise relationship plays a vital role in the re-id problem, but most of the existing early active learning algorithms fail to consider this relationship. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel and efficient early active learning algorithm with a pairwise constraint for person re-identification in this paper. By introducing the pairwise constraint, the closeness of similar representations of instances is enforced in active learning. This benefits the performance of active learning for re-id. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm.