Faster Person Re-Identification: One-Shot-Filter and Coarse-to-Fine Search

Fast person re-identification (ReID) aims to search person images quickly and accurately. The main idea of recent fast ReID methods is the hashing algorithm, which learns compact binary codes and performs fast Hamming distance and counting sort. However, a very long code is needed for high accuracy (e.g., 2048), which compromises search speed. In this work, we introduce a new solution for fast ReID by formulating a novel Coarse-to-Fine (CtF) hashing code search strategy, which complementarily uses short and long codes, achieving both faster speed and better accuracy. It uses shorter codes to coarsely rank broad matching similarities and longer codes to refine only a few top candidates for more accurate instance ReID. Specifically, we design an All-in-One (AiO) module together with a Distance Threshold Optimization (DTO) algorithm. In AiO, we simultaneously learn and enhance multiple codes of different lengths in a single model. It learns multiple codes in a pyramid structure, and encourage shorter codes to mimic longer codes by self-distillation. DTO solves a complex threshold search problem by a simple optimization process, and the balance between accuracy and speed is easily controlled by a single parameter. It formulates the optimization target as a F-beta score that can be optimised by Gaussian cumulative distribution functions. Besides, we find even short code (e.g., 32) still takes a long time under large-scale gallery due to the O(n) time complexity. To solve the problem, we propose a gallery-size-free latent-attributes-based One-Shot-Filter (OSF) strategy, that is always O(1) time complexity, to quickly filter major easy negative gallery images, Specifically, we design a Latent-Attribute-Learning (LAL) module supervised a Single-Direction-Metric (SDM) Loss. LAL is derived from principal component analysis (PCA) that keeps largest variance using shortest feature vector, meanwhile enabling batch and end-to-end learning. Every logit of a feature vector represents a meaningful attribute. SDM is carefully designed for fine-grained attribute supervision, outperforming common metrics such as Euclidean and Cosine metrics. Experimental results on 2 datasets show that CtF+OSF is not only 2% more accurate but also 5x faster than contemporary hashing ReID methods. Compared with non-hashing ReID methods, CtF is 50x faster with comparable accuracy. OSF further speeds CtF by 2x again and upto 10x in total with almost no accuracy drop.