Gait Recognition Using 3-D Human Body Shape Inference

Haidong Zhu, Zhaoheng Zheng, Ram Nevatia; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 909-918

Gait recognition, which identifies individuals based on their walking patterns, is an important biometric technique since it can be observed from a distance and does not require the subject's cooperation. Recognizing a person's gait is difficult because of the appearance variants in human silhouette sequences produced by varying viewing angles, carrying objects, and clothing. Recent research has produced a number of ways for coping with these variants. In this paper, we present the usage of inferring 3-D body shapes distilled from limited images, which are, in principle, invariant to the specified variants. Inference of 3-D shape is a difficult task, especially when only silhouettes are provided in a dataset. We provide a method for learning 3-D body inference from silhouettes by transferring knowledge from 3-D shape prior from RGB photos. We use our method on multiple existing state-of-the-art gait baselines and obtain consistent improvements for gait identification on two public datasets, CASIA-B and OUMVLP, on several variants and settings, including a new setting of novel views not seen during training.