Futuristic person re-identification over internet of biometrics things (IoBT): Technical potential versus practical reality

This article presents an overview of how person re-identification can be achieved over the Internet of Biometric Things (IoBT) architecture by enabling technologies and protocols for multimodal biometric authentication leveraging futuristic cues. The Internet of Things (IoT), as a new era of technology, extends the power of the internet to a whole range of devices, thus reshaping our daily lives in the best possible way. IoT-enabled intelligent surveillance devices are the most indispensable part of public safety and security in smart cities. These IoT devices generate a vast amount of surveillance traffic that is practically impossible for humans to continuously monitor and/or analyze. Person re-identification (PRId), which aims to track and recognize a person in a multi-camera scene is an important feature of visual surveillance systems in IoT infrastructures and can utilize the aforementioned traffic. This is where the concept of IoBT, which is a cloud-centric biometric authentication architecture composed of these IoT-enabled devices for the PRId system, comes into play. This article conceptualizes an overview of interpreting various futuristic cues on the IoT platform for achieving PRId. We highlight some opportunities and key challenges of implementing this futuristic PRId system on IoBT. The article is a proof of concept of the technical potential of such implementation in the near future.