Gait recognition under various viewing angles based on correlated motion regression

Abstract

It is well recognized that gait is an important biometric feature to identify a person at a distance, e.g., in video surveillance application. However, in reality, change of viewing angle causes significant challenge for gait recognition. A novel approach using regression-based view transformation model (VTM) is proposed to address this challenge. Gait features from across views can be normalized into a common view using learned VTM(s). In principle, a VTM is used to transform gait feature from one viewing angle (source) into another viewing angle (target). It consists of multiple regression processes to explore correlated walking motions, which are encoded in gait features, between source and target views. In the learning processes, sparse regression based on the elastic net is adopted as the regression function, which is free from the problem of overfitting and results in more stable regression models for VTM construction. Based on widely adopted gait database, experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves upon existing VTM-based methods and outperforms most other baseline methods reported in the literature. Several practical scenarios of applying the proposed method for gait recognition under various views are also discussed in this paper.