Human gait recognition via deterministic learning

Abstract

Recognition of temporal/dynamical patterns is among the most difficult pattern recognition tasks. Human gait recognition is a typical difficulty in the area of dynamical pattern recognition. It classifies and identifies individuals by their time-varying gait signature data. Recently, a new dynamical pattern recognition method based on deterministic learning theory was presented, in which a time-varying dynamical pattern can be effectively represented in a time-invariant manner and can be rapidly recognized. In this paper, we present a new model-based approach for human gait recognition via the aforementioned method, specifically for recognizing people by gait. The approach consists of two phases: a training (learning) phase and a test (recognition) phase. In the training phase, side silhouette lower limb joint angles and angular velocities are selected as gait features. A five-link biped model for human gait locomotion is employed to demonstrate that functions containing joint angle and angular velocity state vectors characterize the gait system dynamics. Due to the quasi-periodic and symmetrical characteristics of human gait, the gait system dynamics can be simplified to be described by functions of joint angles and angular velocities of one side of the human body, thus the feature dimension is effectively reduced. Locally-accurate identification of the gait system dynamics is achieved by using radial basis function (RBF) neural networks (NNs) through deterministic learning. The obtained knowledge of the approximated gait system dynamics is stored in constant RBF networks. A gait signature is then derived from the extracted gait system dynamics along the phase portrait of joint angles versus angular velocities. A bank of estimators is constructed using constant RBF networks to represent the training gait patterns. In the test phase, by comparing the set of estimators with the test gait pattern, a set of recognition errors are generated, and the average L(1) norms of the errors are taken as the similarity measure between the dynamics of the training gait patterns and the dynamics of the test gait pattern. Therefore, the test gait pattern similar to one of the training gait patterns can be rapidly recognized according to the smallest error principle. Finally, experiments are carried out on the NLPR and UCSD gait databases to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.