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Over the past ten years, human re-identification has received increased attention from the computer vision research community. However, for the most part, these research papers are divorced from the context of how such algorithms would be used in a real-world system. This paper describes the unique opportunity our group of academic researchers had to design and deploy a human re-identification system in a demanding real-world environment: a busy airport. The system had to be designed from the ground up, including robust modules for real-time human detection and tracking, a distributed, low-latency software architecture, and a front-end user interface designed for a specific scenario. None of these issues are typically addressed in re-identification research papers, but all are critical to an effective system that end users would actually be willing to adopt. We detail the challenges of the real-world airport environment, the computer vision algorithms underlying our human detection and re-identification algorithms, our robust software architecture, and the ground-truthing system required to provide the training and validation data for the algorithms. Our initial results show that despite the challenges and constraints of the airport environment, the proposed system achieves very good performance while operating in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]