Gait recognition using Pose Kinematics and Pose Energy Image

Many of the existing gait recognition approaches represent a gait cycle using a single 2D image called Gait Energy Image (GEI) or its variants. Since these methods suffer from lack of dynamic information, we model a gait cycle using a chain of key poses and extract a novel feature called Pose Energy Image (PEI). PEI is the average image of all the silhouettes in a key pose state of a gait cycle. By increasing the resolution of gait representation, more detailed dynamic information can be captured. However, processing speed and space requirement are higher for PEI than the conventional GEI methods. To overcome this shortcoming, another novel feature named as Pose Kinematics is introduced, which represents the percentage of time spent in each key pose state over a gait cycle. Although the Pose Kinematics based method is fast, its accuracy is not very high. A hierarchical method for combining these two features is, therefore, proposed. At first, Pose Kinematics is applied to select a set of most probable classes. Then, PEI is used on these selected classes to get the final classification. Experimental results on CMU's Mobo and USF's HumanID data set show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.