Advancements and Challenges in Deep Learning-Based Person Re-Identification: A Review
Liang Zhao, Yuyan Han, Zhihao Chen · Electronics · 2025
Person Re-Identification (Re-ID), a critical component of intelligent surveillance and security systems, seeks to match individuals across disjoint camera networks under complex real-world conditions. While deep learning has revolutionized Re-ID through enhanced feature representation and domain adaptation, a holistic synthesis of its advancements, unresolved challenges, and ethical implications remains imperative. This survey offers a structured and critical examination of Re-ID in the deep learning era, organized into three pillars: technological innovations, persistent barriers, and future frontiers. We systematically analyze breakthroughs in deep architectures (e.g., transformer-based models, hybrid global-local networks), optimization paradigms (contrastive, adversarial, and self-supervised learning), and robustness strategies for occlusion, pose variation, and cross-domain generalization. Critically, we identify underexplored limitations such as annotation bias, scalability-accuracy trade-offs, and privacy-utility conflicts in real-world deployment. Beyond technical analysis, we propose emerging directions, including causal reasoning for interpretable Re-ID, federated learning for decentralized data governance, open-world lifelong adaptation frameworks, and human-AI collaboration to reduce annotation costs. By integrating technical rigor with societal responsibility, this review aims to bridge the gap between algorithmic advancements and ethical deployment, fostering transparent, sustainable, and human-centric Re-ID systems.