Distance learning by mining hard and easy negative samples for person re-identification.

•We have proposed a Hard and Easy Negative samples mining based Distance learning (HEND) approach for person re-identification.•We have designed a symmetric triplet constraint for the proposed HEND approach.•We have proposed a Projection based HEND (PHEND) approach, which simultaneously learns a projection matrix and a distance metric.•We have conducted extensive experiments in this paper to evaluate our approaches.