  Person re-identification (re-ID) has recently been tremendously boosted due
to the advancement of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). The majority of
deep re-ID methods focus on designing new CNN architectures, while less
attention is paid on investigating the loss functions. Verification loss and
identification loss are two types of losses widely used to train various deep
re-ID models, both of which however have limitations. Verification loss guides
the networks to generate feature embeddings of which the intra-class variance
is decreased while the inter-class ones is enlarged. However, training networks
with verification loss tends to be of slow convergence and unstable performance
when the number of training samples is large. On the other hand, identification
loss has good separating and scalable property. But its neglect to explicitly
reduce the intra-class variance limits its performance on re-ID, because the
same person may have significant appearance disparity across different camera
views. To avoid the limitations of the two types of losses, we propose a new
loss, called support neighbor (SN) loss. Rather than being derived from data
sample pairs or triplets, SN loss is calculated based on the positive and
negative support neighbor sets of each anchor sample, which contain more
valuable contextual information and neighborhood structure that are beneficial
for more stable performance. To ensure scalability and separability, a
softmax-like function is formulated to push apart the positive and negative
support sets. To reduce intra-class variance, the distance between the anchor's
nearest positive neighbor and furthest positive sample is penalized.
Integrating SN loss on top of Resnet50, superior re-ID results to the
state-of-the-art ones are obtained on several widely used datasets.
