We address the problem of person re-identification from commodity depth sensors. One challenge for depth-based recognition is data scarcity. Our first contribution addresses this problem by introducing split-rate RGB-to-Depth transfer, which leverages large RGB datasets more effectively than popular fine-tuning approaches. Our transfer scheme is based on the observation that the model parameters at the bottom layers of a deep convolutional neural network can be directly shared between RGB and depth data while the remaining layers need to be fine-tuned rapidly. Our second contribution enhances re-identification for video by implementing temporal attention as a Bernoulli-Sigmoid unit acting upon frame-level features. Since this unit is stochastic, the temporal attention parameters are trained using reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments validate the accuracy of our method in person re-identification from depth sequences. Finally, in a scenario where subjects wear unseen clothes, we show large performance gains compared to a state-of-the-art model which relies on RGB data.

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We conduct an empirical study to test the ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to reduce the effects of nuisance transformations of the input data, such as location, scale and aspect ratio. We isolate factors by adopting a common convolutional architecture either deployed globally on the image to compute class posterior distributions, or restricted locally to compute class conditional distributions given location, scale and aspect ratios of bounding boxes determined by proposal heuristics. In theory, averaging the latter should yield inferior performance compared to proper marginalization. Yet empirical evidence suggests the converse, leading us to conclude that -at the current level of complexity of convolutional architectures and scale of the data sets used to train them -CNNs are not very effective at marginalizing nuisance variability. We also quantify the effects of context on the overall classification task and its impact on the performance of CNNs, and propose improved sampling techniques for heuristic proposal schemes that improve end-to-end performance to state-of-the-art levels. We test our hypothesis on a classification task using the ImageNet Challenge benchmark and on a wide-baseline matching task using the Oxford and Fischer's datasets.