Resolution as a Direction: Vector-Panning Feature Alignment for Cross-Resolution Re-Identification

Cross-resolution person re-identification (CR-ReID) remains challenging in practical surveillance, where camera quality and capture distance lead to substantial resolution gaps between low-resolution (LR) queries and high-resolution (HR) gallery images. Prior approaches commonly rely on super-resolution (SR) or resolution-invariant representation learning, which often increases system complexity and may not directly address the feature mismatch induced by resolution degradation. In this work, we report a new empirical finding from a dedicated analysis in which identity-specific variation is averaged out: the HR--LR feature discrepancy produced by standard ReID backbones exhibits a consistent, resolution-related semantic direction in the embedding space. We further support this observation with statistical analyses based on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and Pearson correlation analysis. Motivated by this finding, we propose Vector Panning Feature Alignment (VPFA), a lightweight post-hoc module that learns to pan LR features along the learned resolution direction to obtain pseudo-HR representations. VPFA operates after feature extraction and can be integrated into existing ReID systems with negligible overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple CR-ReID benchmarks show that VPFA achieves state-of-the-art performance while improving efficiency compared to SR-based or jointly trained alternatives.