Transformer-Based Person Re-Identification: A Comprehensive Review

In the evolving landscape of surveillance and security applications, the task of person re-identification(re-ID) has significant importance, but also presents notable difficulties. This task entails the process of accurately matching and identifying persons across several camera views that do not overlap with one another. This is of utmost importance to video surveillance, public safety, and person-tracking applications. However, vision-related difficulties, such as variations in appearance, occlusions, viewpoint changes, cloth changes, scalability, limited robustness to environmental factors, and lack of generalizations, still hinder the development of reliable person re-ID methods. There are few approaches have been developed based on these difficulties relied on traditional deep-learning techniques. Nevertheless, recent advancements of transformer-based methods, have gained widespread adoption in various domains owing to their unique architectural properties. Recently, few transformer-based person re-ID methods have developed based on these difficulties and achieved good results. To develop reliable solutions for person re-ID, a comprehensive analysis of transformer-based methods is necessary. However, there are few studies that consider transformer-based techniques for further investigation. This review proposes recent literature on transformer-based approaches, examining their effectiveness, advantages, and potential challenges. This review is the first of its kind to provide insights into the revolutionary transformer-based methodologies used to tackle many obstacles in person re-ID, providing a forward-thinking outlook on current research and potentially guiding the creation of viable applications in real-world scenarios. The main objective is to provide a useful resource for academics and practitioners engaged in person re-ID.