# Person Search Challenges and Solutions: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01605/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Joint Detection and Identification Feature Learning for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01850/) (2016)
- [Person Re-identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02531/) (2016)
- [Person Search with Natural Language Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05729/) (2017)
- [Dual-Path Convolutional Image-Text Embeddings with Instance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05535/) (2017)
- [ViTAA: Visual-Textual Attributes Alignment in Person Search by Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07327/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Representation Learning for Text-to-Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10534/) (2019)
- [Learning Context Graph for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01830/) (2019)
- [Identity-Aware Textual-Visual Matching with Latent Co-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01988/) (2017)
- [Pose-Guided Multi-Granularity Attention Network for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08440/) (2018)
- [Person Search via A Mask-Guided Two-Stream CNN Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08107/) (2018)
- [Re-ID Driven Localization Refinement for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08580/) (2019)
- [Query-guided End-to-End Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01203/) (2019)
- [Person Search by Multi-Scale Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08582/) (2018)
- [Neural Person Search Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06777/) (2017)
- [Robust Partial Matching for Person Search in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09329/) (2020)
- [IAN: The Individual Aggregation Network for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05552/) (2017)
- [Unity Style Transfer for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02068/) (2020)
- [Diverse Knowledge Distillation for End-to-End Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11187/) (2020)
- [Deep Feature Learning via Structured Graph Laplacian Embedding for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07791/) (2017)
- [Knowledge Distillation for End-to-End Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01058/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Detection and Re-identification Integrated Net for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00376/) (2018)
- [Segmentation Mask Guided End-to-End Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10179/) (2019)
- [FMT:Fusing Multi-task Convolutional Neural Network for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00406/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Text-Based Person Search with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10807/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning-based Occluded Person Re-identification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14452/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Person Re-Identification: A Systematic Survey of Challenges and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06057/) (2021)
- [From Attributes to Natural Language: A Survey and Foresight on Text-based Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00096/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Video-based Person Re-Identification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11332/) (2023)
- [CLIPVehicle: A Unified Framework for Vision-based Vehicle Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04120/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Person search has drawn increasing attention due to its real-world applications and research significance. Person search aims to find a probe person in a gallery of scene images with a wide range of applications, such as criminals search, multicamera tracking, missing person search, etc. Early person search works focused on image-based person search, which uses person image as the search query. Text-based person search is another major person search category that uses free-form natural language as the search query. Person search is challenging, and corresponding solutions are diverse and complex. Therefore, systematic surveys on this topic are essential. This paper surveyed the recent works on image-based and text-based person search from the perspective of challenges and solutions. Specifically, we provide a brief analysis of highly influential person search methods considering the three significant challenges: the discriminative person features, the query-person gap, and the detection-identification inconsistency. We summarise and compare evaluation results. Finally, we discuss open issues and some promising future research directions.