Comparative study of histogram distance measures for re-identification

Abstract: Color based re-identification methods usually rely on a distance function to measure the similarity between individuals. In this paper we study the behavior of several histogram distance measures in different color spaces. We wonder whether there is a particular histogram distance measure better than others, likewise also, if there is a color space that present better discrimination features. Several experiments are designed and evaluated in several images to obtain measures against various color spaces. We test in several image databases. A measure ranking is generated to calculate the area under the CMC, this area is the indicator used to evaluate which distance measure and color space present the best performance for the considered databases. Also, other parameters such as the image division in horizontal stripes and number of histogram bins, have been studied.