At present, in the field of person reidentification (re-id), the commonly used supervised learning algorithms require a large amount of labeled samples, which is not conducive to the model promotion. On the other hand, the accuracy of unsupervised learning algorithms is lower than supervised algorithms due to the lack of discriminant information. To address these issues, we make use of a small amount of labeled samples to add discriminant information in the basic dictionary learning. Moreover, the sparse coefficients of dictionary learning are decomposed into a projection problem of the original features, and the projection matrix is trained by labeled samples, which is transformed into a metric learning problem. It thus integrates the advantages of the two methods through combining dictionary learning and metric learning. After the data are trained, a projection matrix is used to project the unlabeled features into a feature subspace and the labels of the samples are reconstructed. The semisupervised learning problem is then transformed to a supervised learning problem with a graph regularization term. Experiments on different public pedestrian datasets, such as VIPeR, PRID, iLIDS, and CUHK01, show that the recognition accuracy of our method is better than some other existing person re-id methods. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.