Cheb-GR: Rethinking K-nearest Neighbor Search in Re-ranking for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (ReID) is the task of matching individuals across different camera views. Existing approaches typically employ neural networks to extract discriminative features, ranking gallery images based on their similarities to probe images. While effective, these methods are often enhanced through re-ranking, a post-processing step that refines initial retrieval results without requiring additional model training. However, current re-ranking methods mostly rely on k-nearest neighbor search to extract similar images that might have the same identity as the query, which is time-consuming with a high computation burden, limiting their applications in reality. We rethink the effect of the k-nearest neighbor search and introduce the Chebyshev's Theorem-guided Graph Re-ranking (Cheb-GR) method, which adopts the adaptive neighbor search guided by Chebyshev's Theorem over the k-nearest neighbor search for efficient neighbor selection. Our method leverages graph convolution operations to refine image features and achieve robust re-ranking, leading to enhanced retrieval performance. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis based on Chebyshev's Inequality to elucidate the factors contributing to the strong performance of the proposed method. Our method significantly reduces the computation costs while maintaining relatively strong performance. Through extensive experiments in both general and cross-domain settings, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Cheb-GR and its potential for real-world applications.