Abstract Identifying vehicles across cameras in traffic surveillance is fundamentally important for public safety purposes. However, despite some preliminary work, the rapid vehicle search in large-scale datasets has not been investigated. Moreover, modelling a view-invariant similarity between vehicle images from different views is still highly challenging. To address the problems, in this paper, we propose a Ranked Semantic Sampling (RSS) guided binary embedding method for fast crossview vehicle Re-IDentification (Re-ID). The search can be conducted by efficiently computing similarities in the projected space. Unlike previous methods using random sampling, we design treestructured attributes to guide the mini-batch sampling. The ranked pairs of hard samples in the mini-batch can improve the convergence of optimization. By minimizing a novel ranked semantic distance loss defined according to the structure, the learned Hamming distance is view-invariant, which enables cross-view Re-ID. The experimental results demonstrate that RSS outperforms the state-of-theart approaches and the learned embedding from one dataset can be transferred to achieve the task of vehicle Re-ID on another dataset.