Finding people in repeated shots of the same scene

Abstract

The goal of this work is to find all occurrences of a particular person in a sequence of photographs taken over a short period of time. For identification, we assume each individual’s hair and clothing stays the same throughout the sequence. Even with these assumptions, the task remains challenging as people can move around, change their pose and scale, and partially occlude each other. We propose a two stage method. First, individuals are identified by clustering frontal face detections using color clothing information. Second, a color based pictorial structure model is used to find occurrences of each person in images where their frontal face detection was missed. Two extensions improving the pictorial structure detections are also described. In the first extension, we obtain a better clothing segmentation to improve the accuracy of the clothing color model. In the second extension, we simultaneously consider multiple detection hypotheses of all people potentially present in the shot. Our results show that people can be re-detected in images where they do not face the camera. Results are presented on several sequences from a personal photo collection.