Multi-label learning with multi-label smoothing regularization for vehicle re-identification

Vehicle re-identification (re-ID) is a vital technique to the urban intelligent video surveillance system and smart city. Given a query vehicle image, the vehicle re-ID aims to search and retrieve the images of the same vehicle that have been captured by different surveillance cameras with various viewing angles. Based on the observation that essential vehicle attributes, like vehicle‘s color and types (e.g., sedan, bus, truck, and so on), could be used as important traits to recognize vehicle, an effective multi-label learning (MLL) method is proposed in this paper that can simultaneously learn three labels: vehicle's ID, type, and color. With three labels, a multi-label smoothing regularization (MLSR) is further proposed, which can allocate a uniform label distribution to the multi-labeled training images to regularize MLL model and improve vehicle re-ID performance. Extensive experiments conducted on the VeRi and VehicleID datasets have demonstrated that the proposed MLL with MLSR approach can effectively improve the performance delivered by the baseline and outperform multiple state-of-the-art vehicle re-ID methods as well.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the grants 61871434, 61602191, and 61802136, in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province under the grants 2019J06017, 2016J01308 and 2017J05103, in part by the Fujian-100 Talented People Program, in part by High-level Talent Innovation Program of Quanzhou City under the grant 2017G027, in part by the Promotion Program for Young and Middle-aged Teacher in Science and Technology Research of Huaqiao University under the grants ZQN-YX403 and ZQN-PY418, and in part by the High-Level Talent Project Foundation of Huaqiao University under the grants 14BS201, 14BS204 and 16BS108, and in part by the Graduate Student Scientific Research Innovation Project Foundation of Huaqiao Universit