Open-Attribute Person Retrieval: Finding People Through Distinctive and Novel Attributes

Person retrieval in surveillance videos often depends on attributes described by witnesses or operators. However, the most useful cues in practice are not always common appearance descriptions (e.g., gender, clothing color), but rare and distinctive attributes that can sharply reduce the search space (e.g., holding a weapon, lying on the ground). Existing text-based person retrieval benchmarks and methods largely focus on identity-centric retrieval with common pedestrian descriptions, leaving such retrieval-critical attributes underexplored. In this paper, we introduce Open-Attribute Person Retrieval (OAPR), a practical retrieval setting that aims to retrieve all pedestrian instances matching a given attribute query, including rare or previously unseen visual concepts, regardless of identity. To support this task, we construct EPAD, an Expanded Pedestrian Attribute Dataset with 267,885 pedestrian images and a unified vocabulary of 65 attributes, including safety-critical actions, assistive devices, and object interactions that are rarely covered in prior benchmarks. We further propose GAP-CLIP, a lightweight CLIP-based framework that learns gated attribute-aware body-part representations for OAPR. Extensive experiments on EPAD demonstrate that GAP-CLIP achieves the strongest top-K retrieval performance on the full attribute space and on out-of-distribution attributes. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mlnjeongpark/Open-Attribute-Person-Retrieval.