Abstract: Existing projection-based person re-identification methods usually suffer from long time training, high dimension of projection matrix, and low matching rate. In addition, the intra-class samples may be much less than the inter-class samples when a training data set is built. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a distance-centralization based algorithm for similarity metric learning. When a training data set is to be built, the feature values of a same target person are centralized and the inter-class distances are built by these centralized values, while the intra-class distances are still directly built from original samples. As a result, the number of intra-class samples and the number of inter-class samples can be much closer, which reduces the risk of overfitting because of class imbalance. In addition, during learning projection matrix, the resulted projection vectors can be approximately orthogonal by using a strategy of updating training data sets. In this way, the proposed method can significantly reduce both the computational complexity and the storage space. Finally, the conjugate gradient method is used in the projection vector learning. The advantage of this method is its quadratic convergence, which can promote the convergence. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has higher efficiency. The matching rate can be significantly improved, and the time of training is much shorter than most of existing algorithms of person re-identification.