Person Retrieval in Video Surveillance Using Deep Learning–Based Instance Segmentation

Video surveillance systems are deployed at many places such as airports, train stations, and malls for security and monitoring purposes. However, it is laborious to search for and retrieve persons in multicamera surveillance systems, especially with cluttered backgrounds and appearance variations among multiple cameras. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a person retrieval method that extracts the attributes of a masked image using an instance segmentation module for each object of interest. It uses attributes such as color and type of clothes to describe a person. The proposed person retrieval system involves four steps: (1) using the YOLACT++ model to perform pixelwise person segmentation, (2) conducting appearance-based attribute feature extraction using a multiple convolutional neural network classifier, (3) employing a search engine with a fundamental attribute matching approach, and (4) implementing a video summarization technique to produce a temporal abstraction of retrieved objects. Experimental results show that the proposed retrieval system can achieve effective retrieval performance and provide a quick overview of retrieved content for multicamera surveillance systems.