Self-Reinforcing Prototype Evolution with Dual-Knowledge Cooperation for Semi-Supervised Lifelong Person Re-Identification

Current lifelong person re-identification (LReID) methods predominantly rely on fully labeled data streams. However, in real-world scenarios where annotation resources are limited, a vast amount of unlabeled data coexists with scarce labeled samples, leading to the Semi-Supervised LReID (Semi-LReID) problem where LReID methods suffer severe performance degradation. Existing LReID methods, even when combined with semi-supervised strategies, suffer from limited long-term adaptation performance due to struggling with the noisy knowledge occurring during unlabeled data utilization. In this paper, we pioneer the investigation of Semi-LReID, introducing a novel Self-Reinforcing Prototype Evolution with Dual-Knowledge Cooperation framework (SPRED). Our key innovation lies in establishing a self-reinforcing cycle between dynamic prototype-guided pseudo-label generation and new-old knowledge collaborative purification to enhance the utilization of unlabeled data. Specifically, learnable identity prototypes are introduced to dynamically capture the identity distributions and generate high-quality pseudo-labels. Then, the dual-knowledge cooperation scheme integrates current model specialization and historical model generalization, refining noisy pseudo-labels. Through this cyclic design, reliable pseudo-labels are progressively mined to improve current-stage learning and ensure positive knowledge propagation over long-term learning. Experiments on the established Semi-LReID benchmarks show that our SPRED achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/ICCV2025-SPRED