A Comprehensive Survey of Visible Infrared Person Re-Identification from an Application Perspective

Person re-identification (ReID) is a significant issue in computer vision, aiming to match the same pedestrian across various cameras. Recent research on this issue has successfully reached a satisfactory performance level in the daytime scenario. However, the performance of ReID in low illumination scenarios suffers a dramatic degradation due to the insufficient personal information captured by visible cameras in low or no light scenarios. To address this challenge, the adoption of novel camera technologies for more effective pedestrian data is imperative. Owing to the constraints of distance and usage scenarios in deploying depth cameras, practical infrared cameras are frequently utilized, spurring research in visible infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID). Significant progress has been made in the field of VI-ReID in recent years, but only a few reviews have categorized this problem based on methodology. This article offers a novel perspective by classifying VI-ReID according to application scenarios. Following our categorization scheme, the main advancements in deep learning for VI-ReID over the past five years have been grouped into three categories as follows: retrieval of infrared images using visible images (V → IR), retrieval of visible images using infrared images (IR → V), and joint retrieval of infrared and visible images (V → IR and IR → V). Next, this survey outlines the available datasets and evaluation metrics. After that, we categorize diverse methodologies under the proposed classification and assess their performance metrics across common datasets. Finally, we present two prospective avenues for future research in this domain, informed by the current state of advancement.