Lifelong Person Re-identification via Privacy-Preserving Data Replay

Abstract: Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) aims to incrementally accumulate knowledge across a sequence of tasks under domain shifts. Recently, replay-based methods have demonstrated strong effectiveness in LReID by rehearsing past samples stored in an auxiliary memory. However, storing historical exemplars raises concerns over data privacy. To avoid this, exemplar-free approaches attempt to match the distribution of past data without storing raw samples. Despite being privacy-friendly, these methods often suffer from performance degradation due to the forgetting of specific past knowledge representations. To this end, we propose to condense information from sequential data into the pixel space in the replay memory, enabling Privacy-Preserving Replay (Pr^2R). More specifically, by distilling the training characteristics of multiple real images into a single image, the condensed samples undergo pixel-level changes. This not only protects the privacy of the original data but also makes the replay samples more representative for sequential tasks. During the style replay phase, we align the current domain to the previous one while simultaneously adapting the replay samples to match the style of the current domain. This dual-alignment strategy effectively mitigates both class-incremental challenges and forgetting caused by domain shifts. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly improves replay effectiveness while preserving data privacy. Specifically, Pr^2R achieves 4% and 6% higher accuracy on sequential tasks compared to the current state-of-the-art and other replay-based methods, respectively.