Abstract
In aerial surveillance using drones, person re-identification (ReID) is crucial for public safety. However, low resolutions in drone footage often leads to a significant drop in ReID performance of subjects. To investigate this issue, rather than relying solely on real-world datasets, we employed a synthetic dataset that systematically captures variations in drone altitude and distance. We also utilized an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) framework to analyze how low resolutions affect ReID. Based on our findings, we propose a method that improves ReID accuracy by filtering out attributes that are not robust in low-resolution environments and retaining only those features that remain reliable. Experiments on the Market1501 dataset show a 6.59% percentage point improvement in accuracy at a 16% resolution scale. We further discuss the effectiveness of our approach in drone-based aerial surveillance systems under Fog/Edge Computing paradigms.