Accelerating Identification and Authentication in E-surveillance Systems

People Re-identification in E-surveillance Systems

Hemprasad Y. Badgujar (2014-2017)
Technology has an ever-growing role in public
security, and video analysis and surveillance sit at the
heart of techniques used. However, mass-market
technology for such tasks can be fairly primitive,
relying on video observation alone. Despite living in an
age when many people carry a high-resolution camera
in their pocket, surveillance often relies on low-quality
CCTV cameras. This research involves nding ways to
extract meaningful descriptors from this low quality
footage in order to aid and automate the tracking of
individuals.

The Problem:
Consider a crowded scene such as an airport. When
trying to identify people from distance using traditional
CCTV cameras, it will likely be unsuitable to use facial
recognition or other common biometrics such as gait,
ngerprint and iris recognition. It is therefore much more
suitable to build descriptors using features such as color
and texture. With these descriptors of individual people,
it is possible to track these individuals as they move
between non-overlapping cameras. Some researcher
presented a system based on producing a color silhouette
of a person, as an individuals appearance is dominated by
the clothes that they are wearing. From this, a color
histogram was used and compared with other histograms
produced from peoples silhouettes. Comparison was
achieved by nding out the histogram intersection, and
similar histogram intersections implied a match between
people in different images. However, color in an image
can be affected by many external factors, such as lighting
and the sensor in the camera; this can be resolved by
normalizing the image in order to provide consistency
between all cameras. The task of determining whether a
person passing through a network of camera has already
been observed is known as the people re-identication
problem, and is the focus of this research.
Current methods generally involve using humans in order
to monitor incoming surveillance video streams. the large
number of people being monitored would make this task
too large for human operators themselves to handle. In
addition, the accuracy of humans may be too low. This
research proposes a rank-style system, where the system
will produce a top n potential matches for an arbitrary
individual, and a human operator can pick from these
potential matches. This is known as a rank-n matching
scale, and is commonly used in this area. Efcient
methods to identify accurately are therefore an important
area of research.
DATA ACQUISITION

HUMAN
DETECTION

Motivation:

Aims:

In many surveillance systems, detection and tracking of

moving objects constitute the main problem. The number
of targets and occlusions produce ambiguities which
introduce a requirement for reacquiring objects which
have been lost during tracking. However, the ultimate
goal of any surveillance system is not to track and
reacquire targets, but to understand a scene and to
establish an identity of the desired object.

The majority of current methods use color as a feature. A

dataset used to typically test people re-identication
systems is the VIPeR dataset which consists of very small
images with background included. When using color as a
feature, most solutions do not attempt to remove the
background, and hence color features will be picked up
from the background. Our solution aims to remove the
background in order to only extract features from the
foreground.

Human re-identification can be defined as a

determination whether a given person of interest has
already been observed over a network of cameras. This
issue is also known as the person re-identification
problem. Person re-identification can be considered at
different levels depending on information cues, which are
currently available in the system.

Research challenges:
Appearance matching of the same person registered in
disjoint camera views is one of the most challenging
issues in every video analysis system. The underlying
challenge of the human re-identication problem arises
from signicant appearance changes, caused by variations
in viewing angle, illumination and object pose. Different
color responses, dierent camera viewpoints and
dierent camera parameters impede establishing
correspondence between parts of the human body, while
matching appearances.
Illumination changes: Day light intensity, shade,
changes in illumination color in indoor and outdoor
environments
Color changes: The same object acquired by dierent
cameras shows color dissimilarities
Pose changes: camera and viewpoint change as well as
the articulation of the human body lead to signicant
dierences in appearances of the same individual
observed from dierent cameras
Occlusions: self-occlusions (caused by body parts) and
occlusions caused by other people or objects
Scale changes: side of object depends on distance
between camera and object which may vary in
surveillance
Detections: to recognize individuals and detect human
silhouettes automatically
Discriminative features: to focus on distinctive cues
(features), providing within-group discriminations.

Human re-identication framework:

SIGNATURE
COMPUTTATION

HUMAN
TRACKING

The Aims of This Research:

To use regression and dimensionality reduction in
order to remove the background from image frames
without successive image frames. This is due to how
some datasets only have one image per person per
camera.
To build a descriptor which is able to represent
people in a unique way.
To use this descriptor to build a high-performing
method of re-identifying people, with the majority of
people appearing within rank-20.
Ensuring the developed methods can be applied at a
city-scale with industry and city partners.

Research Impact:
There are several different ways of building a descriptor
of people, with examples being not only based on color,
but also on texture and soft biometrics. In addition, some
research has looked into how to identify people as groups
rather than individually However, no approach
particularly stands out above the rest. This research will
make it easier to track individuals by producing a rank-nstyle ranking. This will allow suspicious individuals to be
tracked in congested environments where this has
otherwise been challenging. Whilst most systems use
basic technologies such as color, which is easily inuenced
by illumination changes or background noise, our system
will isolate the background and take illumination changes
into account in order to attempt to prevent this. In
addition, the use of a skeleton model enables the system
to be aware of locations of particular parts of a persons
body. This aids not only in background subtraction, but
also in terms of tracking. Trajectory calculations could be
used to attempt to calculate a persons location even when
they are not in view of a camera.

Query to Database

SIGNATURE
COMPUTTATION

SIGNATURE
COMPUTTATION

SIGNATURE
DATABASE

Result

Datasets of People Re-Identification Using Non Overlapping Multi-Camera Streams

VIPeR

PRID

GRID

CUHK01

i-LIDs

ETHZ