Automatic Gait Recognition for Human ID at a Distance

Abstract

Abstract : Recognising people by their gait is a biometric of increasing interest. Now, analysis has progressed from evaluation by few techniques on small databases with encouraging results to large databases and still with encouraging results. The potential of gait as a biometric was encouraged by the considerable amount of evidence available, especially in biomechanics and literature. This report describes research within the Human ID (HiD) at a Distance program sponsored by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency through the European Research Office of the U.S. Army at the University of Southampton from 2000-2004. The research program was essentially designed to explore the capability of basic of gait as a biometric and potential for translation from a laboratory to a real world scenario. By development of specialized databases, by development of new techniques and by evaluation of laboratory and real-world data we contend that these objectives have indeed been achieved. There is a considerable volume of subsidiary developments not just of new computer vision techniques but also of approaches for spatiotemporal image analysis, particularly targeted at the modeling and understanding of human movement through image sequences. The ongoing interest in gait in a biometric is in a large part the wider remit of the analysis of human motion by computer vision techniques and due to the capability of gait as a biometric, as demonstrated by the results achieved by the HiD program