Automated person re-identification may be assisted by consideration of attributes of the person in a joint classification with matching of the person. By both solving for similarities in a plurality of attributes and identities, discriminative interactions may be captured. Automated person re-identification may be assisted by consideration of a semantic color name. Rather than a color histogram, probability distributions are mapped to color terms of the semantic color name. Using other descriptors as well, similarity measures for the various descriptors are weighted and combined into a score. Either or both considerations may be used.