  Re-identification is generally carried out by encoding the appearance of a
subject in terms of outfit, suggesting scenarios where people do not change
their attire. In this paper we overcome this restriction, by proposing a
framework based on a deep convolutional neural network, SOMAnet, that
additionally models other discriminative aspects, namely, structural attributes
of the human figure (e.g. height, obesity, gender). Our method is unique in
many respects. First, SOMAnet is based on the Inception architecture, departing
from the usual siamese framework. This spares expensive data preparation
(pairing images across cameras) and allows the understanding of what the
network learned. Second, and most notably, the training data consists of a
synthetic 100K instance dataset, SOMAset, created by photorealistic human body
generation software. Synthetic data represents a good compromise between
realistic imagery, usually not required in re-identification since surveillance
cameras capture low-resolution silhouettes, and complete control of the
samples, which is useful in order to customize the data w.r.t. the surveillance
scenario at-hand, e.g. ethnicity. SOMAnet, trained on SOMAset and fine-tuned on
recent re-identification benchmarks, outperforms all competitors, matching
subjects even with different apparel. The combination of synthetic data with
Inception architectures opens up new research avenues in re-identification.
