Human identity and gender recognition from gait sequences with arbitrary walking directions

We investigate the problem of human identity and gender recognition from gait sequences with arbitrary walking directions. Most current approaches make the unrealistic assumption that persons walk along a fixed direction or a pre-defined path. Given a gait sequence collected from arbitrary walking directions, we first obtain human silhouettes by background subtraction and cluster them into several clusters. For each cluster, we compute the cluster-based averaged gait image as features. Then, we propose a sparse reconstruction based metric learning method to learn a distance metric to minimize the intra-class sparse reconstruction errors and maximize the inter-class sparse reconstruction errors simultaneously, so that discriminative information can be exploited for recognition. The experimental results show the efficacy of our approach.