# From Attributes to Natural Language: A Survey and Foresight on Text-based Person Re-identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00096/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 108 of its 195 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 108)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [Person Transfer GAN to Bridge Domain Gap for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08565/) (2017)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [Deep Metric Learning via Lifted Structured Feature Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06452/) (2015)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02816/) (2022)
- [GLIPv2: Unifying Localization and Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05836/) (2022)
- [Learning Fine-grained Image Similarity with Deep Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.4661/) (2014)
- [Joint Detection and Identification Feature Learning for Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01850/) (2016)
- [Seeing Out of tHe bOx: End-to-End Pre-training for Vision-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03135/) (2021)
- [Learning Deep Representations of Fine-grained Visual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05395/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [LATex: Leveraging Attribute-based Text Knowledge for Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23722/) (2025)
- [Addressing the ID-Matching Challenge in Long Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06973/) (2025)
- [Decoupled Cross-Modal Alignment Network for Text-RGBT Person Retrieval and A High-Quality Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07950/) (2025)
- [Document Classification Pattern Recognition via Information Fusion: A Systematic Review of Multimodal and Multiview Representation Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23910/) (2026)
- [Where Should I Join? Robot Group Joining via Language-Guided Goal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28467/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-based person re-identification (Re-ID) is a challenging topic in the field of complex multimodal analysis, its ultimate aim is to recognize specific pedestrians by scrutinizing attributes/natural language descriptions. Despite the wide range of applicable areas such as security surveillance, video retrieval, person tracking, and social media analytics, there is a notable absence of comprehensive reviews dedicated to summarizing the text-based person Re-ID from a technical perspective. To address this gap, we propose to introduce a taxonomy spanning Evaluation, Strategy, Architecture, and Optimization dimensions, providing a comprehensive survey of the text-based person Re-ID task. We start by laying the groundwork for text-based person Re-ID, elucidating fundamental concepts related to attribute/natural language-based identification. Then a thorough examination of existing benchmark datasets and metrics is presented. Subsequently, we further delve into prevalent feature extraction strategies employed in text-based person Re-ID research, followed by a concise summary of common network architectures within the domain. Prevalent loss functions utilized for model optimization and modality alignment in text-based person Re-ID are also scrutinized. To conclude, we offer a concise summary of our findings, pinpointing challenges in text-based person Re-ID. In response to these challenges, we outline potential avenues for future open-set text-based person Re-ID and present a baseline architecture for text-based pedestrian image generation-guided re-identification(TBPGR).