Coupled Patch Alignment for Matching Cross-view Gaits

Gait recognition has attracted growing attention in recent years as the gait of humans has a strong discriminative ability even under low resolution at a distance. Unfortunately, the performance of gait recognition can be largely affected by view change. To address this problem, we propose a Coupled Patch Alignment (CPA) algorithm that effectively matches a pair of gaits across different views. To realize CPA, we first build a certain amount of patches, and each of them is made up of a sample as well as its intra-class and inter-class nearest-neighbors. Then we design an objective function for each patch to balance the cross-view intra-class compactness and the cross-view inter-class separability. Finally, all the local independent patches are combined to render a unified objective function. Theoretically, we show that the proposed CPA has a close relationship with Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). Algorithmically, we extend CPA to "Multi-dimensional Patch Alignment" (MPA) that can handle an arbitrary number of views. Comprehensive experiments on CASIA(B), USF and OU-ISIR gait databases firmly demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods over other existing popular methods in terms of cross-view gait recognition.

Gait Recognition Based on Normal Distance Maps

Gait is a commonly used biometric for human recognition. Its main advantage relies on its ability to identify people at distances at which other biometrics fail. In this paper, we develop a new approach for gait recognition that combines the distance transform with curvatures of local contours. We call our gait feature template the normal distance map. Our method encodes both body shapes and boundary curvatures into a novel feature descriptor that is more robust than existing gait representations. We evaluate our approach on the widely used and challenging USF and CASIA-B datasets. Furthermore, we evaluate it on the OU-ISIR gait dataset, the largest one available in the literature, to obtain statistically reliable results. We verify our approach is significantly superior to the current state-of-the-art under most conditions.

Robust Gait Recognition by Integrating Inertial and RGBD Sensors

Gait has been considered as a promising and unique biometric for person identification. Traditionally, gait data are collected using either color sensors, such as a CCD camera, depth sensors, such as a Microsoft Kinect, or inertial sensors, such as an accelerometer. However, a single type of sensors may only capture part of the dynamic gait features and make the gait recognition sensitive to complex covariate conditions, leading to fragile gait-based person identification systems. In this paper, we propose to combine all three types of sensors for gait data collection and gait recognition, which can be used for important identification applications, such as identity recognition to access a restricted building or area. We propose two new algorithms, namely EigenGait and TrajGait, to extract gait features from the inertial data and the RGBD (color and depth) data, respectively. Specifically, EigenGait extracts general gait dynamics from the accelerometer readings in the eigenspace and TrajGait extracts more detailed subdynamics by analyzing 3-D dense trajectories. Finally, both extracted features are fed into a supervised classifier for gait recognition and person identification. Experiments on 50 subjects, with comparisons to several other state-of-the-art gait-recognition approaches, show that the proposed approach can achieve higher recognition accuracy and robustness.

A Grassmannian Approach to Address View Change Problem in Gait Recognition

Gait recognition appears to be a valuable asset when conventional biometrics cannot be employed. Nonetheless, recognizing human by gait is not a trivial task due to the complex human kinematic structure and other external factors affecting human locomotion. A major challenge in gait recognition is view variation. A large difference between the views in the query and reference sets often leads to performance deterioration. In this paper, we show how to generate virtual views to compensate the view difference in the query and reference sets, making it possible to match the query and reference sets using standardized views. The proposed method, which combines multiview matrix representation and a novel randomized kernel extreme learning machine, is an end-to-end solution for view change problem under Grassmann manifold treatment. Under the right condition, the view-tagging problem can be eliminated. Since the recording angle and walking direction of the subject are not always available, this is particularly valuable for a practical gait recognition system. We present several working scenarios for multiview recognition that have not be considered before. Rigorous experiments have been conducted on two challenging benchmark databases containing multiview gait datasets. Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-arts methods.

Wearable Device-Based Gait Recognition Using Angle Embedded Gait Dynamic Images and a Convolutional Neural Network

The widespread installation of inertial sensors in smartphones and other wearable devices provides a valuable opportunity to identify people by analyzing their gait patterns, for either cooperative or non-cooperative circumstances. However, it is still a challenging task to reliably extract discriminative features for gait recognition with noisy and complex data sequences collected from casually worn wearable devices like smartphones. To cope with this problem, we propose a novel image-based gait recognition approach using the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) without the need to manually extract discriminative features. The CNN’s input image, which is encoded straightforwardly from the inertial sensor data sequences, is called Angle Embedded Gait Dynamic Image (AE-GDI). AE-GDI is a new two-dimensional representation of gait dynamics, which is invariant to rotation and translation. The performance of the proposed approach in gait authentication and gait labeling is evaluated using two datasets: (1) the McGill University dataset, which is collected under realistic conditions; and (2) the Osaka University dataset with the largest number of subjects. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves competitive recognition accuracy over existing approaches and provides an effective parametric solution for identification among a large number of subjects by gait patterns.

Accelerometer-Based Gait Recognition by Sparse Representation of Signature Points With Clusters

Gait, as a promising biometric for recognizing human identities, can be nonintrusively captured as a series of acceleration signals using wearable or portable smart devices. It can be used for access control. Most existing methods on accelerometer-based gait recognition require explicit step-cycle detection, suffering from cycle detection failures and intercycle phase misalignment. We propose a novel algorithm that avoids both the above two problems. It makes use of a type of salient points termed signature points (SPs), and has three components: 1) a multiscale SP extraction method, including the localization and SP descriptors; 2) a sparse representation scheme for encoding newly emerged SPs with known ones in terms of their descriptors, where the phase propinquity of the SPs in a cluster is leveraged to ensure the physical meaningfulness of the codes; and 3) a classifier for the sparse-code collections associated with the SPs of a series. Experimental results on our publicly available dataset of 175 subjects showed that our algorithm outperformed existing methods, even if the step cycles were perfectly detected for them. When the accelerometers at five different body locations were used together, it achieved the rank-1 accuracy of 95.8% for identification, and the equal error rate of 2.2% for verification.

Monocular 3-D gait tracking in surveillance scenes

Gait recognition can potentially provide a noninvasive and effective biometric authentication from a distance. However, the performance of gait recognition systems will suffer in real surveillance scenarios with multiple interacting individuals and where the camera is usually placed at a significant angle and distance from the floor. We present a methodology for view-invariant monocular 3-D human pose tracking in man-made environments in which we assume that observed people move on a known ground plane. First, we model 3-D body poses and camera viewpoints with a low dimensional manifold and learn a generative model of the silhouette from this manifold to a reduced set of training views. During the online stage, 3-D body poses are tracked using recursive Bayesian sampling conducted jointly over the scene's ground plane and the pose-viewpoint manifold. For each sample, the homography that relates the corresponding training plane to the image points is calculated using the dominant 3-D directions of the scene, the sampled location on the ground plane and the sampled camera view. Each regressed silhouette shape is projected using this homographic transformation and is matched in the image to estimate its likelihood. Our framework is able to track 3-D human walking poses in a 3-D environment exploring only a 4-D state space with success. In our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate the significant improvements of the homographic alignment over a commonly used similarity transformation and provide quantitative pose tracking results for the monocular sequences with a high perspective effect from the CAVIAR dataset.

Human identification using temporal information preserving gait template

Gait Energy Image (GEI) is an efficient template for human identification by gait. However, such a template loses temporal information in a gait sequence, which is critical to the performance of gait recognition. To address this issue, we develop a novel temporal template, named Chrono-Gait Image (CGI), in this paper. The proposed CGI template first extracts the contour in each gait frame, followed by encoding each of the gait contour images in the same gait sequence with a multichannel mapping function and compositing them to a single CGI. To make the templates robust to a complex surrounding environment, we also propose CGI-based real and synthetic temporal information preserving templates by using different gait periods and contour distortion techniques. Extensive experiments on three benchmark gait databases indicate that, compared with the recently published gait recognition approaches, our CGI-based temporal information preserving approach achieves competitive performance in gait recognition with robustness and efficiency.

Multivariate multilinear regression

Conventional regression methods, such as multivariate linear regression (MLR) and its extension principal component regression (PCR), deal well with the situations that the data are of the form of low-dimensional vector. When the dimension grows higher, it leads to the under sample problem (USP): the dimensionality of the feature space is much higher than the number of training samples. However, little attention has been paid to such a problem. This paper first adopts an in-depth investigation to the USP in PCR, which answers three questions: 1) Why is USP produced? 2) What is the condition for USP, and 3) How is the influence of USP on regression. With the help of the above analysis, the principal components selection problem of PCR is presented. Subsequently, to address the problem of PCR, a multivariate multilinear regression (MMR) model is proposed which gives a substitutive solution to MLR, under the condition of multilinear objects. The basic idea of MMR is to transfer the multilinear structure of objects into the regression coefficients as a constraint. As a result, the regression problem is reduced to find two low-dimensional coefficients so that the principal components selection problem is avoided. Moreover, the sample size needed for solving MMR is greatly reduced so that USP is alleviated. As there is no closed-form solution for MMR, an alternative projection procedure is designed to obtain the regression matrices. For the sake of completeness, the analysis of computational cost and the proof of convergence are studied subsequently. Furthermore, MMR is applied to model the fitting procedure in the active appearance model (AAM). Experiments are conducted on both the carefully designed synthesizing data set and AAM fitting databases verified the theoretical analysis.