Abstract Multi-shot person re-identification (MsP-RID) utilizes multiple images from the same person to facilitate identi- fication. Considering the fact that motion information may not be discriminative nor reliable enough for MsP-RID, this paper is focused on handling the large variations in the visual appearances through learning discriminative visual metrics for identification. Existing metric learning-based methods usually exploit pair-wise or triple-wise similarity constraints, that generally demands intensive optimization in metric learning, or leads to degraded performances by using sub-optimal solutions. In addition, as the training data are significantly imbalanced, the learning can be largely dominated by the negative pairs and thus produces unstable and non-discriminative results. In this paper, we propose a novel type of similarity constraint. It assigns the sample points to a set of reference points to produce a linear number of reference constraints. Several optimal transport-based schemes for reference constraint generation are proposed and studied. Based on those constraints, by utilizing a typical regressive metric learning model, the closed-form solution of the learned metric can be easily obtained. Extensive experiments and comparative studies on several public MsP-RID benchmarks have validated the effectiveness of our method and its significant superiority over the state-of-the-art MsP-RID methods in terms of both identification accuracy and running speed