Learning Longterm Representations for Person Re-Identification Using Radio Signals

TL;DR

RF-ReID introduces a novel method for long-term person re-identification using radio frequency signals, which are more persistent, privacy-preserving, and effective in occluded or poorly lit environments compared to traditional RGB-based approaches.

Contribution

The paper presents RF-ReID, a new RF signal-based approach for long-term person ReID that outperforms RGB methods and works in occluded, low-light, and privacy-sensitive scenarios.

Findings

RF-ReID outperforms state-of-the-art RGB-based ReID methods in long-term scenarios.

RF signals enable ReID in occluded and poor lighting conditions.

RF signals are more privacy-preserving than visual data.

Abstract

Person Re-Identification (ReID) aims to recognize a person-of-interest across different places and times. Existing ReID methods rely on images or videos collected using RGB cameras. They extract appearance features like clothes, shoes, hair, etc. Such features, however, can change drastically from one day to the next, leading to inability to identify people over extended time periods. In this paper, we introduce RF-ReID, a novel approach that harnesses radio frequency (RF) signals for longterm person ReID. RF signals traverse clothes and reflect off the human body; thus they can be used to extract more persistent human-identifying features like body size and shape. We evaluate the performance of RF-ReID on longitudinal datasets that span days and weeks, where the person may wear different clothes across days. Our experiments demonstrate that RF-ReID outperforms state-of-the-art RGB-based ReID approaches for long term person ReID. Our results also reveal two interesting features: First since RF signals work in the presence of occlusions and poor lighting, RF-ReID allows for person ReID in such scenarios. Second, unlike photos and videos which reveal personal and private information, RF signals are more privacy-preserving, and hence can help extend person ReID to privacy-concerned domains, like healthcare.