A Deep Learning-Based Approach to Progressive Vehicle Re-identification for Urban Surveillance

While re-identification (Re-Id) of persons has attracted intensive attention, vehicle, which is a significant object class in urban video surveillance, is often overlooked by vision community. Most existing methods for vehicle Re-Id only achieve limited performance, as they predominantly focus on the generic appearance of vehicle while neglecting some unique identities of vehicle (e.g., license plate). In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach to PROgressive Vehicle re-ID, called “PROVID”. Our approach treats vehicle Re-Id as two specific progressive search processes: coarse-to-fine search in the feature space, and near-to-distant search in the real world surveillance environment. The first search process employs the appearance attributes of vehicle for a coarse filtering, and then exploits the Siamese Neural Network for license plate verification to accurately identify vehicles. The near-to-distant search process retrieves vehicles in a manner like human beings, by searching from near to faraway cameras and from close to distant time. Moreover, to facilitate progressive vehicle Re-Id research, we collect to-date the largest dataset named VeRi-776 from large-scale urban surveillance videos, which contains not only massive vehicles with diverse attributes and high recurrence rate, but also sufficient license plates and spatiotemporal labels. A comprehensive evaluation on the VeRi-776 shows that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 9.28 % improvements in term of mAP.