VERI-Wild: A Large Dataset and a New Method for Vehicle Re-Identification in the Wild

Vehicle Re-identification (ReID) is of great significance to the intelligent transportation and public security. However, many challenging issues of Vehicle ReID in real-world scenarios have not been filly investigated, e.g., the high viewpoint variations, extreme illumination conditions, complex backgrounds, and different camera sources. To promote the research of vehicle ReID in the wild, we collect a new dataset called VERI-Wild with the following distinct features: 1) The vehicle images are captured by a large surveillance system containing 174 cameras covering a large urban district (more than 200km(2)). 2) The camera network continuously captures vehicles for 24 hours in each day and lasts for 1 month. 3) It is the first vehicle ReID dataset that is collected from unconstrained conditions(1). VERI-Wild contains more than 400 thousand images of 40 thousand vehicle IDs. In this paper, we also propose a new method for vehicle ReID, in which, the ReID model is coupled into a Feature Distance Adversarial Network (FDA-Net), and a novel feature distance adversary scheme is designed to online generate hard negative samples in feature space to facilitate ReID model training. The comprehensive results show the effectiveness of our method on the proposed dataset(2) and the other two existing datasets.