Deep Learning-based Occluded Person Re-identification: A Survey

Occluded person re-identification (Re-ID) aims at addressing the occlusion problem when retrieving the person of interest across multiple cameras. With the promotion of deep learning technology and the increasing demand for intelligent video surveillance, the frequent occlusion in real-world applications has made occluded person Re-ID draw considerable interest from researchers. A large number of occluded person Re-ID methods have been proposed while there are few surveys that focus on occlusion. To fill this gap and help boost future research, this paper provides a systematic survey of occluded person Re-ID. Through an in-depth analysis of the occlusion in person Re-ID, most existing methods are found to only consider part of the problems brought by occlusion. Therefore, we review occlusion-related person Re-ID methods from the perspective of issues and solutions. We summarize four issues caused by occlusion in person Re-ID, i.e., position misalignment, scale misalignment, noisy information, and missing information. The occlusion-related methods addressing different issues are then categorized and introduced accordingly. After that, we summarize and compare the performance of recent occluded person Re-ID methods on four popular datasets: Partial-ReID, Partial-iLIDS, Occluded-ReID, and Occluded-DukeMTMC. Finally, we provide insights on promising future research directions.