Scalable Metric Learning via Weighted Approximate Rank Component   Analysis
  We are interested in the large-scale learning of Mahalanobis distances, with a particular focus on person re-identification.   We propose a metric learning formulation called Weighted Approximate Rank Component Analysis (WARCA). WARCA optimizes the precision at top ranks by combining the WARP loss with a regularizer that favors orthonormal linear mappings, and avoids rank-deficient embeddings. Using this new regularizer allows us to adapt the large-scale WSABIE procedure and to leverage the Adam stochastic optimization algorithm, which results in an algorithm that scales gracefully to very large data-sets. Also, we derive a kernelized version which allows to take advantage of state-of-the-art features for re-identification when data-set size permits kernel computation.   Benchmarks on recent and standard re-identification data-sets show that our method beats existing state-of-the-art techniques both in term of accuracy and speed. We also provide experimental analysis to shade lights on the properties of the regularizer we use, and how it improves performance. 
Cijo Jose and Francois Fleuret
cs.CV