VVI-ReID is a critical technique for all-day surveillance, where temporal information provides additional cues beyond static images. However, existing approaches rely heavily on fully supervised learning with expensive cross-modality annotations, limiting scalability. To address this issue, we investigate Unsupervised Learning for VVI-ReID (USL-VVI-ReID), which learns identity-discriminative representations directly from unlabeled video tracklets. Directly extending image-based USL-VI-ReID methods to this setting with generic pretrained encoders leads to suboptimal performance. Such encoders suffer from weak identity discrimination and strong modality bias, resulting in severe intra-modality identity confusion and pronounced clustering granularity imbalance between visible and infrared modalities. These issues jointly degrade pseudo-label reliability and hinder effective cross-modality alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a Causal Bootstrapped Alignment (CBA) framework that explicitly exploits inherent video priors. First, we introduce Causal Intervention Warm-up (CIW), which performs sequence-level causal interventions by leveraging temporal identity consistency and cross-modality identity consistency to suppress modality- and motion-induced spurious correlations while preserving identity-relevant semantics, yielding cleaner representations for unsupervised clustering. Second, we propose Prototype-Guided Uncertainty Refinement (PGUR), which employs a coarse-to-fine alignment strategy to resolve cross-modality granularity mismatch, reorganizing under-clustered infrared representations under the guidance of reliable visible prototypes with uncertainty-aware supervision. Extensive experiments on the HITSZ-VCM and BUPTCampus benchmarks demonstrate that CBA significantly outperforms existing USL-VI-ReID methods when extended to the USL-VVI-ReID setting.
Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) enables cross-modality identity matching for all-day surveillance, yet existing methods predominantly focus on the image level or rely heavily on costly identity annotations. While video-based VI-ReID has recently emerged to exploit temporal dynamics for improved robustness, existing studies remain limited to supervised settings. Crucially, the unsupervised video VI-ReID problem, where models must learn from RGB and infrared tracklets without identity labels, remains largely unexplored despite its practical importance in real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose HiTPro (Hierarchical Temporal Prototyping), a prototype-driven framework without explicit hard pseudo-label assignment for unsupervised video-based VI-ReID. HiTPro begins with an efficient Temporal-aware Feature Encoder that first extracts discriminative frame-level features and then aggregates them into a robust tracklet-level representation. Building upon these features, HiTPro first constructs reliable intra-camera prototypes via Intra-Camera Tracklet Prototyping by aggregating features from temporally partitioned sub-tracklets. Through Hierarchical Cross-Prototype Alignment, we perform a two-stage positive mining process: progressing from within-modality associations to cross-modality matching, enhanced by Dynamic Threshold Strategy and Soft Weight Assignment. Finally, {Hierarchical Contrastive Learning} progressively optimizes feature-prototype alignment across three levels: intra-camera discrimination, cross-camera same-modality consistency, and cross-modality invariance. Extensive experiments on HITSZ-VCM and BUPTCampus demonstrate that HiTPro achieves state-of-the-art performance under fully unsupervised settings, significantly outperforming adapted baselines and establishes a strong baseline for future research.
The core of video-based visible-infrared person re-identification (VVI-ReID) lies in learning sequence-level modal-invariant representations across different modalities. Recent research tends to use modality-shared language prompts generated by CLIP to guide the learning of modal-invariant representations. Despite achieving optimal performance, such methods still face limitations in efficient spatial-temporal modeling, sufficient cross-modal interaction, and explicit modality-level loss guidance. To address these issues, we propose the language-driven sequence-level modal-invariant representation learning (LSMRL) method, which includes spatial-temporal feature learning (STFL) module, semantic diffusion (SD) module and cross-modal interaction (CMI) module. To enable parameter- and computation-efficient spatial-temporal modeling, the STFL module is built upon CLIP with minimal modifications. To achieve sufficient cross-modal interaction and enhance the learning of modal-invariant features, the SD module is proposed to diffuse modality-shared language prompts into visible and infrared features to establish preliminary modal consistency. The CMI module is further developed to leverage bidirectional cross-modal self-attention to eliminate residual modality gaps and refine modal-invariant representations. To explicitly enhance the learning of modal-invariant representations, two modality-level losses are introduced to improve the features' discriminative ability and their generalization to unseen categories. Extensive experiments on large-scale VVI-ReID datasets demonstrate the superiority of LSMRL over AOTA methods.
Estimating reliable cross-modality association is crucial to unsupervised visible-infrared person re-ID. While optimal transport is shown to be a practical solution for cross-modality association, it suffers from the rigidness of hard label assignment without considering the impact of cluster noise. Moreover, enforcing only cross-modality contrast is also suboptimal, as it fails to jointly optimize the similarity relation within and across modality. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for cross-modality learning by well exploitation of prototypes: First, instead of contrasting with cross-modality prototypes, we show that modality-unified prototypical contrast facilitates better modality invariance by jointly and simultaneously optimizing similarity relation within and across-modality. Taking self-prototype as a steady teacher, we further refine the instance-prototype online relation through prototype-guided self-distillation. The two components are optimized in a unified framework, leading to a simple yet effective model. On standard VI-ReID benchmarks, we perform extensive comparison and analysis, validating the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/Terminator8758/PoSeD.