Improving Person Re-identification Through Low-Light Image Enhancement

Oliverio J. Santana, Javier Lorenzo-Navarro, David Freire-Obregón, Daniel Hernández-Sosa, Modesto Castrillón Santana

Abstract: Person re-identification (ReID) is a popular area of research in the field of computer vision. Despite the significant advancements achieved in recent years, most of the current methods rely on datasets containing subjects captured with good lighting under static conditions. ReID presents a significant challenge in real-world sporting scenarios, such as long-distance races that take place over varying lighting conditions, ranging from bright daylight to night-time. Unfortunately, increasing the exposure time on the capture devices to mitigate low-light environments is not a feasible solution, as it would result in blurry images due to the motion of the runners. This paper surveys several low-light image enhancement methods and finds that including an image pre-processing step in the ReID pipeline before extracting the distinctive body features of the subjects can lead to significant improvements in performance.