# Human Identification at a Distance: Challenges, Methods and Results on the Competition HID 2025

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07565 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07565/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Gait Recognition in the Wild with Dense 3D Representations and A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02569/) (2022)
- [GaitSet: Cross-view Gait Recognition through Utilizing Gait as a Deep Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03247/) (2021)
- [LidarGait: Benchmarking 3D Gait Recognition with Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10598/) (2022)
- [BigGait: Learning Gait Representation You Want by Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19122/) (2024)
- [Cross-Covariate Gait Recognition: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14404/) (2023)
- [OpenGait: A Comprehensive Benchmark Study for Gait Recognition towards Better Practicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09138/) (2024)
- [On Denoising Walking Videos for Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18582/) (2025)
- [GLGait: A Global-Local Temporal Receptive Field Network for Gait Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06834/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human identification at a distance (HID) is challenging because traditional biometric modalities such as face and fingerprints are often difficult to acquire in real-world scenarios. Gait recognition provides a practical alternative, as it can be captured reliably at a distance. To promote progress in gait recognition and provide a fair evaluation platform, the International Competition on Human Identification at a Distance (HID) has been organized annually since 2020. Since 2023, the competition has adopted the challenging SUSTech-Competition dataset, which features substantial variations in clothing, carried objects, and view angles. No dedicated training data are provided, requiring participants to train their models using external datasets. Each year, the competition applies a different random seed to generate distinct evaluation splits, which reduces the risk of overfitting and supports a fair assessment of cross-domain generalization. While HID 2023 and HID 2024 already used this dataset, HID 2025 explicitly examined whether algorithmic advances could surpass the accuracy limits observed previously. Despite the heightened difficulty, participants achieved further improvements, and the best-performing method reached 94.2% accuracy, setting a new benchmark on this dataset. We also analyze key technical trends and outline potential directions for future research in gait recognition.