VIPS: Learning-View-Invariant Feature for Person Search

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become indispensable tools for surveillance, enabled by their ability to capture multi-perspective imagery in dynamic environments. Among critical UAV-based tasks, cross-platform person search—detecting and identifying individuals across distributed camera networks—presents unique challenges. Severe viewpoint variations, occlusions, and cluttered backgrounds in UAV-captured data degrade the performance of conventional discriminative models, which struggle to maintain robustness under such geometric and semantic disparities. To address this, we propose view-invariant person search (VIPS), a novel two-stage framework combining Faster R-CNN with a view-invariant re-Identification (VIReID) module. Unlike conventional discriminative models, VIPS leverages the semantic flexibility of large vision–language models (VLMs) and adopts a two-stage training strategy to decouple and align text-based ID descriptors and visual features, enabling robust cross-view matching through shared semantic embeddings. To mitigate noise from occlusions and cluttered UAV-captured backgrounds, we introduce a learnable mask generator for feature purification. Furthermore, drawing from vision–language models, we design view prompts to explicitly encode perspective shifts into feature representations, enhancing adaptability to UAV-induced viewpoint changes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with ablation studies validating the efficacy of each component. Beyond technical advancements, this work highlights the potential of VLM-derived semantic alignment for UAV applications, offering insights for future research in real-time UAV-based surveillance systems.