Person re-identification is an open and challenging problem in computer
vision. Existing approaches have concentrated on either designing the best
feature representation or learning optimal matching metrics in a static setting
where the number of cameras are fixed in a network. Most approaches have
neglected the dynamic and open world nature of the re-identification problem,
where a new camera may be temporarily inserted into an existing system to get
additional information. To address such a novel and very practical problem, we
propose an unsupervised adaptation scheme for re-identification models in a
dynamic camera network. First, we formulate a domain perceptive
re-identification method based on geodesic flow kernel that can effectively
find the best source camera (already installed) to adapt with a newly
introduced target camera, without requiring a very expensive training phase.
Second, we introduce a transitive inference algorithm for re-identification
that can exploit the information from best source camera to improve the
accuracy across other camera pairs in a network of multiple cameras. Extensive
experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach
significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning based
alternatives whilst being extremely efficient to compute.