Global Trajectory Helps Person Retrieval in a Camera Network

We are concerned about retrieving a query person from the videos taken by a non-overlapping camera network. Existing methods often rely on pure visual matching or consider temporal constraint, but ignore the spatial information of the camera network. To address this problem, we propose a framework of person retrieval based on cross-camera trajectory generation which integrates both temporal and spatial information. To obtain the pedestrian trajectories, we propose a new cross-camera spatio-temporal model that integrates the walking habits of pedestrians and the path layout between cameras, forming a joint probability distribution. Such a spatio-temporal model among a camera network can be specified using sparsely sampled pedestrian data. Based on the spatio-temporal model, the cross-camera trajectories of a specific pedestrian can be extracted by the conditional random field model, and further optimized by the restricted nonnegative matrix factorization. Finally, a trajectory re-ranking technology is proposed to improve the person retrieval results. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we build the first dataset of cross-camera pedestrian trajectories over an actual monitoring scenario, namely the Person Trajectory Dataset. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.