# When Person Re-identification Meets Changing Clothes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04070/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Clothes-Changing Person Re-identification with RGB Modality Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06890/) (2022)
- [Cloth-Changing Person Re-identification from A Single Image with Gait Prediction and Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15537/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Spatio-Temporal Person Re-identification: Algorithms and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15076/) (2021)
- [Instruct-ReID: A Multi-purpose Person Re-identification Task with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07520/) (2023)
- [Learning Clothing and Pose Invariant 3D Shape Representation for Long-Term Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10658/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data in Human Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09191/) (2022)
- [Semantic-guided Pixel Sampling for Cloth-Changing Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11522/) (2021)
- [Semantic-aware Consistency Network for Cloth-changing Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14113/) (2023)
- [DeepChange: A Large Long-Term Person Re-Identification Benchmark with Clothes Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14685/) (2021)
- [A Versatile Framework for Multi-scene Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11121/) (2024)
- [SapiensID: Foundation for Human Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04708/) (2025)
- [GEFF: Improving Any Clothes-Changing Person ReID Model using Gallery Enrichment with Face Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13807/) (2022)
- [HAMoBE: Hierarchical and Adaptive Mixture of Biometric Experts for Video-based Person ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05038/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Manga Character Re-identification via Face-body and Spatial-temporal Associated Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04621/) (2022)
- [DLCR: A Generative Data Expansion Framework via Diffusion for Clothes-Changing Person Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07205/) (2024)
- [Identity-aware Feature Decoupling Learning for Clothing-change Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05851/) (2025)
- [Identity-Guided Collaborative Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Reidentification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04400/) (2023)
- [Image-Text-Image Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Person Re-Identification with Hybrid Clothing States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16600/) (2024)
- [Sampling Agnostic Feature Representation for Long-Term Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09574/) (2022)
- [Causal Clothes-Invariant Feature Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06145/) (2023)
- [CCUP: A Controllable Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline for Pretraining Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13567/) (2024)
- [Colors See Colors Ignore: Clothes Changing ReID with Color Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07230/) (2025)
- [Identity-Sensitive Knowledge Propagation for Cloth-Changing Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12023/) (2022)
- [Exploring Shape Embedding for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification via 2D-3D Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18438/) (2023)
- [Instruct-ReID++: Towards Universal Purpose Instruction-Guided Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17790/) (2024)
- [Towards Anytime Retrieval: A Benchmark for Anytime Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16635/) (2025)
- [Specialized Re-Ranking: A Novel Retrieval-Verification Framework for Cloth Changing Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03592/) (2022)
- [A Benchmark of Video-Based Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11165/) (2022)
- [CLIP-Driven Cloth-Agnostic Feature Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09198/) (2024)
- [Attention-based Shape and Gait Representations Learning for Video-based Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03716/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Person re-identification (ReID) is now an active research topic for AI-based video surveillance applications such as specific person search, but the practical issue that the target person(s) may change clothes (clothes inconsistency problem) has been overlooked for long. For the first time, this paper systematically studies this problem. We first overcome the difficulty of lack of suitable dataset, by collecting a small yet representative real dataset for testing whilst building a large realistic synthetic dataset for training and deeper studies. Facilitated by our new datasets, we are able to conduct various interesting new experiments for studying the influence of clothes inconsistency. We find that changing clothes makes ReID a much harder problem in the sense of bringing difficulties to learning effective representations and also challenges the generalization ability of previous ReID models to identify persons with unseen (new) clothes. Representative existing ReID models are adopted to show informative results on such a challenging setting, and we also provide some preliminary efforts on improving the robustness of existing models on handling the clothes inconsistency issue in the data. We believe that this study can be inspiring and helpful for encouraging more researches in this direction. The dataset is available on the project website: https://wanfb.github.io/dataset.html.