A Robust Pedestrian Re-Identification and Out-Of-Distribution Detection Framework

Pedestrian re-identification is an important field due to its applications in security and safety. Most current solutions for this problem use CNN-based feature extraction and assume that only the identities that are in the training data can be recognized. On the one hand, the pedestrians in the training data are called In-Distribution (ID). On the other hand, in real-world scenarios, new pedestrians and objects can appear in the scene, and the model should detect them as Out-Of-Distribution (OOD). In our previous study, we proposed a pedestrian re-identification based on von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution. Each identity is embedded in the unit sphere as a compact vMF distribution far from other identity distributions. Recently, a framework called Virtual Outlier Synthetic (VOS) was proposed, which detects OOD based on synthesizing virtual outliers in the embedding space in an online manner. Their approach assumes that the samples from the same object map to a compact space, which aligns with the vMF-based approach. Therefore, in this paper, we revisited the vMF approach and merged it with VOS to detect OOD data points. Experiment results showed that our framework was able to detect new pedestrians that do not exist in the training data in the inference phase. Furthermore, this framework improved the re-identification performance and holds a significant potential in real-world scenarios.