Cross-Camera Trajectories Help Person Retrieval in a Camera Network

We are concerned with retrieving a query person from multiple videos captured by a non-overlapping camera network. Existing methods often rely on purely visual matching or consider temporal constraints but ignore the spatial information of the camera network. To address this issue, we propose a pedestrian retrieval framework based on cross-camera trajectory generation that integrates both temporal and spatial information. To obtain pedestrian trajectories, we propose a novel cross-camera spatio-temporal model that integrates pedestrians’ walking habits and the path layout between cameras to form a joint probability distribution. Such a cross-camera spatio-temporal model can be specified using sparsely sampled pedestrian data. Based on the spatio-temporal model, cross-camera trajectories can be extracted by the conditional random field model and further optimised by restricted non-negative matrix factorization. Finally, a trajectory re-ranking technique is proposed to improve the pedestrian retrieval results. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we construct the first cross-camera pedestrian trajectory dataset, the Person Trajectory Dataset, in real surveillance scenarios. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.