Open-World Group Retrieval with Ambiguity Removal: A Benchmark

Group retrieval has attracted plenty of attention in artificial intelligence, traditional group retrieval researches assume that members in a group are unique and do not change under different cameras. However, the assumption may not be met for practical situations such as open-world and group-ambiguity scenarios. This paper tackles an important yet non-studied problem: re-identifying changing groups of people under the open-world and group-ambiguity scenarios in different camera fields. The open-world scenario considers that there are probably non-target people for the probe set appear in the searching gallery, while the group-ambiguity scenario means the group members may change. The open-world and group-ambiguity issue is very challenging for the existing methods because the changing of group members results in dramatic visual variations. Nevertheless, as far as we know, the existing literature lacks benchmarks which target on coping with this issue. In this paper, we propose a new group retrieval dataset named OWGA-Campus to consider these challenges. Moreover, we propose a person-to-group similarity matching based ambiguity removal (P2GSM-AR) method to solve these problems and realize the intention of group retrieval. Experimental results on OWGA-Campus dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed P2GSM-AR approach in improving the performance of the state-of-the-art feature extraction methods of person re-id towards the open-world and ambiguous group retrieval task.