On Learning Disentangled Representations for Gait Recognition
This work addresses the challenge of robust gait recognition for biometric identification in scenarios with variables like clothing and viewing angles, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of gait recognition being degraded by confounding variables like clothing and viewing angles by proposing GaitNet, an AutoEncoder framework that disentangles appearance, canonical, and pose features from RGB imagery, achieving superior performance on datasets like CASIA-B, USF, and FVG compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Gait, the walking pattern of individuals, is one of the important biometrics modalities. Most of the existing gait recognition methods take silhouettes or articulated body models as gait features. These methods suffer from degraded recognition performance when handling confounding variables, such as clothing, carrying and viewing angle. To remedy this issue, we propose a novel AutoEncoder framework, GaitNet, to explicitly disentangle appearance, canonical and pose features from RGB imagery. The LSTM integrates pose features over time as a dynamic gait feature while canonical features are averaged as a static gait feature. Both of them are utilized as classification features. In addition, we collect a Frontal-View Gait (FVG) dataset to focus on gait recognition from frontal-view walking, which is a challenging problem since it contains minimal gait cues compared to other views. FVG also includes other important variations, e.g., walking speed, carrying, and clothing. With extensive experiments on CASIA-B, USF, and FVG datasets, our method demonstrates superior performance to the SOTA quantitatively, the ability of feature disentanglement qualitatively, and promising computational efficiency. We further compare our GaitNet with state-of-the-art face recognition to demonstrate the advantages of gait biometrics identification under certain scenarios, e.g., long distance/lower resolutions, cross viewing angles.