A person re-identification algorithm based on color topology

The color feature is one of the main features in person re-identification. Due to the illumination variation and similarity interference, the color feature is not robust. For practical applications, different pedestrian may have similar statistical distribution in terms of color histogram, while the same pedestrian may have different statistical distribution. However, it can be observed that although the color statistical information is not robust, the color spatial distribution can remain stable. According to this observation, this paper proposes a new feature, namely the color topology, to describe the color spatial distribution. One image is segmented into patches and the proposed color topology is represented according to both the gradient and the value of color changes among adjacent patches. Based on the color topology, a person re-identification algorithm is implemented in this paper. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the recognition performance when compared with the state-of-the-art.