Beyond a Single Crop: Contextualized Embeddings for Player Re-Identification

Ge Luo, Changhuo Yang, Weisi Fan, Rui Yang, Shaokai Wang

Person re-identification is typically addressed by learning identity-discriminative embeddings from individual person crops. However, player re-identification in broadcast sports videos presents a unique challenge: players from the same team often share similar appearances, while video sequences provide repeated observations of the same players under different viewpoints and surrounding contexts. Existing crop-based approaches largely ignore this contextual information, which can be critical for resolving visually similar identities. Here, we propose ContextReID, a contextualized embedding framework that represents a player by jointly considering other players in the same frame and observations from different frames of the broadcast sequence. By incorporating both co-occurring players and cross-frame observations, the model learns identity features relative to the surrounding visual context rather than relying only on isolated appearance cues. We implement this framework with a vision-language model that takes sets of player crops as input and generates context-aware embeddings for individual players. A combined contextual learning and retrieval objective encourages the model to…