COPE: Consistent Occlusion and Prompt Enhancement Network for Occluded Person Re-identification

Occlusion presents two critical challenges for person re-identification (Re-ID): feature interference and information loss. While existing efforts have explored occlusion-aware data augmentation and feature reconstruction to mitigate these issues, the former often fails to address erroneous matches caused by similar occlusion patterns and background distractions, whereas the latter typically introduces significant computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Consistent Occlusion and Prompt Enhancement (COPE) network. COPE incorporates a Cross-Identity Consistent Occlusion (CICO) module that applies identical occlusions across different identities and encourages feature similarity in the same occluded regions across different identities to reduce occlusion feature interference. A Prompt Background Filling (PBF) module leverages vision-language alignment to generate foreground heatmaps and performs random background filling, enhancing feature robustness under varying backgrounds. Additionally, a lightweight Prompt Similarity Scoring (PSS) module refines retrieval similarity by utilizing prompt-guided reliability scores. Extensive experiments on both occluded and holistic Re-ID benchmarks demonstrate that COPE consistently outperforms existing methods. Notably, it achieves 82.4% Rank-1 accuracy and 76.4% mAP on the challenging Occluded-Duke dataset.