  Despite the promising progress made in recent years, person re-identification
(re-ID) remains a challenging task due to the complex variations in human
appearances from different camera views. For this challenging problem, a large
variety of algorithms have been developed in the fully-supervised setting,
requiring access to a large amount of labeled training data. However, the main
bottleneck for fully-supervised re-ID is the limited availability of labeled
training samples. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a
self-trained subspace learning paradigm for person re-ID which effectively
utilizes both labeled and unlabeled data to learn a discriminative subspace
where person images across disjoint camera views can be easily matched. The
proposed approach first constructs pseudo pairwise relationships among
unlabeled persons using the k-nearest neighbors algorithm. Then, with the
pseudo pairwise relationships, the unlabeled samples can be easily combined
with the labeled samples to learn a discriminative projection by solving an
eigenvalue problem. In addition, we refine the pseudo pairwise relationships
iteratively, which further improves the learning performance. A multi-kernel
embedding strategy is also incorporated into the proposed approach to cope with
the non-linearity in person's appearance and explore the complementation of
multiple kernels. In this way, the performance of person re-ID can be greatly
enhanced when training data are insufficient. Experimental results on six
widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and its
performance can be comparable to the reported results of most state-of-the-art
fully-supervised methods while using much fewer labeled data.
