Transformer for Object Re-Identification: A Survey
Mang Ye Shuoyi Chen Chenyue Li Wei-Shi Zheng David Crandall Bo Du
Object Re-Identification (Re-ID) aims to identify and retrieve specific
objects from varying viewpoints. For a prolonged period, this field has been
predominantly driven by deep convolutional neural networks. In recent years,
the Transformer has witnessed remarkable advancements in computer vision,
prompting an increasing body of research to delve into the application of
Transformer in Re-ID. This paper provides a comprehensive review and in-depth
analysis of the Transformer-based Re-ID. In categorizing existing works into
Image/Video-Based Re-ID, Re-ID with limited data/annotations, Cross-Modal
Re-ID, and Special Re-ID Scenarios, we thoroughly elucidate the advantages
demonstrated by the Transformer in addressing a multitude of challenges across
these domains. Considering the trending unsupervised Re-ID, we propose a new
Transformer baseline, UntransReID, achieving state-of-the-art performance on
both single-/cross modal tasks. Besides, this survey also covers a wide range
of Re-ID research objects, including progress in animal Re-ID. Given the
diversity of species in animal Re-ID, we devise a standardized experimental
benchmark and conduct extensive experiments to explore the applicability of
Transformer for this task to facilitate future research. Finally, we discuss
some important yet under-investigated open issues in the big foundation model
era, we believe it will serve as a new handbook for researchers in this field.