  Training a deep architecture using a ranking loss has become standard for the
person re-identification task. Increasingly, these deep architectures include
additional components that leverage part detections, attribute predictions,
pose estimators and other auxiliary information, in order to more effectively
localize and align discriminative image regions. In this paper we adopt a
different approach and carefully design each component of a simple deep
architecture and, critically, the strategy for training it effectively for
person re-identification. We extensively evaluate each design choice, leading
to a list of good practices for person re-identification. By following these
practices, our approach outperforms the state of the art, including more
complex methods with auxiliary components, by large margins on four benchmark
datasets. We also provide a qualitative analysis of our trained representation
which indicates that, while compact, it is able to capture information from
localized and discriminative regions, in a manner akin to an implicit attention
mechanism.
