Automatic learning of gait signatures for people identification

This work targets people identification in video based on the way they walk (i.e. gait). While classical methods typically derive gait signatures from sequences of binary silhouettes, in this work we explore the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for learning high-level descriptors from low-level motion features (i.e. optical flow components). We carry out a thorough experimental evaluation of the proposed CNN architecture on the challenging TUM-GAID dataset. The experimental results indicate that using spatio-temporal cuboids of optical flow as input data for CNN allows to obtain state-of-the-art results on the gait task with an image resolution eight times lower than the previously reported results (i.e. 80x60 pixels).Comment: Proof of concept paper. Technical report on the use of ConvNets (CNN) for gait recognition. Data and code: http://www.uco.es/~in1majim/research/cnngaitof.htm

Robust arbitrary view gait recognition based on parametric 3D human body reconstruction and virtual posture synthesis

This paper proposes an arbitrary view gait recognition method where the gait recognition is performed in 3-dimensional (3D) to be robust to variation in speed, inclined plane and clothing, and in the presence of a carried item. 3D parametric gait models in a gait period are reconstructed by an optimized 3D human pose, shape and simulated clothes estimation method using multiview gait silhouettes. The gait estimation involves morphing a new subject with constant semantic constraints using silhouette cost function as observations. Using a clothes-independent 3D parametric gait model reconstruction method, gait models of different subjects with various postures in a cycle are obtained and used as galleries to construct 3D gait dictionary. Using a carrying-items posture synthesized model, virtual gait models with different carrying-items postures are synthesized to further construct an over-complete 3D gait dictionary. A self-occlusion optimized simultaneous sparse representation model is also introduced to achieve high robustness in limited gait frames. Experimental analyses on CASIA B dataset and CMU MoBo dataset show a significant performance gain in terms of accuracy and robustness

View and clothing invariant gait recognition via 3D human semantic folding

A novel 3-dimensional (3D) human semantic folding is introduced to provide a robust and efficient gait recognition method which is invariant to camera view and clothing style. The proposed gait recognition method comprises three modules: (1) 3D body pose, shape and viewing data estimation network (3D-BPSVeNet); (2) gait semantic parameter folding model; and (3) gait semantic feature refining network. First, 3D-BPSVeNet is constructed based on a convolution gated recurrent unit (ConvGRU) to extract 2-dimensional (2D) to 3D body pose and shape semantic descriptors (2D-3D-BPSDs) from a sequence of gait parsed RGB images. A 3D gait model with virtual dressing is then constructed by morphing the template of 3D body model using the estimated 2D-3D-BPSDs and the recognized clothing styles. The more accurate 2D-3D-BPSDs without clothes are then obtained by using the silhouette similarity function when updating the 3D body model to fit the 2D gait. Second, the intrinsic 2D-3D-BPSDs without interference from clothes are encoded by sparse distributed representation (SDR) to gain the binary gait semantic image (SD-BGSI) in a topographical semantic space. By averaging the SD-BGSIs in a gait cycle, a gait semantic folding image (GSFI) is obtained to give a high-level representation of gait. Third, a gait semantic feature refining network is trained to refine the semantic feature extracted directly from GSFI using three types of prior knowledge, i.e., viewing angles, clothing styles and carrying condition. Experimental analyses on CMU MoBo, CASIA B, KY4D, OU-MVLP and OU-ISIR datasets show a significant performance gain in gait recognition in terms of accuracy and robustness

Gait recognition and understanding based on hierarchical temporal memory using 3D gait semantic folding

Gait recognition and understanding systems have shown a wide-ranging application prospect. However, their use of unstructured data from image and video has affected their performance, e.g., they are easily influenced by multi-views, occlusion, clothes, and object carrying conditions. This paper addresses these problems using a realistic 3-dimensional (3D) human structural data and sequential pattern learning framework with top-down attention modulating mechanism based on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). First, an accurate 2-dimensional (2D) to 3D human body pose and shape semantic parameters estimation method is proposed, which exploits the advantages of an instance-level body parsing model and a virtual dressing method. Second, by using gait semantic folding, the estimated body parameters are encoded using a sparse 2D matrix to construct the structural gait semantic image. In order to achieve time-based gait recognition, an HTM Network is constructed to obtain the sequence-level gait sparse distribution representations (SL-GSDRs). A top-down attention mechanism is introduced to deal with various conditions including multi-views by refining the SL-GSDRs, according to prior knowledge. The proposed gait learning model not only aids gait recognition tasks to overcome the difficulties in real application scenarios but also provides the structured gait semantic images for visual cognition. Experimental analyses on CMU MoBo, CASIA B, TUM-IITKGP, and KY4D datasets show a significant performance gain in terms of accuracy and robustness

Robust arbitrary-view gait recognition based on 3D partial similarity matching

Existing view-invariant gait recognition methods encounter difficulties due to limited number of available gait views and varying conditions during training. This paper proposes gait partial similarity matching that assumes a 3-dimensional (3D) object shares common view surfaces in significantly different views. Detecting such surfaces aids the extraction of gait features from multiple views. 3D parametric body models are morphed by pose and shape deformation from a template model using 2-dimensional (2D) gait silhouette as observation. The gait pose is estimated by a level set energy cost function from silhouettes including incomplete ones. Body shape deformation is achieved via Laplacian deformation energy function associated with inpainting gait silhouettes. Partial gait silhouettes in different views are extracted by gait partial region of interest elements selection and re-projected onto 2D space to construct partial gait energy images. A synthetic database with destination views and multi-linear subspace classifier fused with majority voting are used to achieve arbitrary view gait recognition that is robust to varying conditions. Experimental results on CMU, CASIA B, TUM-IITKGP, AVAMVG and KY4D datasets show the efficacy of the propose method

Fisher Motion Descriptor for Multiview Gait Recognition

The goal of this paper is to identify individuals by analyzing their gait. Instead of using binary silhouettes as input data (as done in many previous works) we propose and evaluate the use of motion descriptors based on densely sampled short-term trajectories. We take advantage of state-of-the-art people detectors to de ne custom spatial con gurations of the descriptors around the target person, obtaining a rich representation of the gait motion. The local motion features (described by the Divergence-Curl-Shear descriptor [1]) extracted on the di erent spatial areas of the person are combined into a single high-level gait descriptor by using the Fisher Vector encoding [2]. The proposed approach, coined Pyramidal Fisher Motion, is experimentally validated on `CASIA' dataset [3] (parts B and C), `TUM GAID' dataset [4], `CMU MoBo' dataset [5] and the recent `AVA Multiview Gait' dataset [6]. The results show that this new approach achieves state-of-the-art results in the problem of gait recognition, allowing to recognize walking people from diverse viewpoints on single and multiple camera setups, wearing di erent clothes, carrying bags, walking at diverse speeds and not limited to straight walking paths

Gait recognition from multiple view-points

A la finalización de la tesis, la principal conclusión que se extrae es que la forma de andar permite identificar a las personas con una buena precisión (superior al 90 por ciento y llegando al 99 por ciento en determinados casos). Centrándonos en los diferentes enfoques desarrollados, el método basado en características extraídas a mano está especialmente indicado para bases de datos pequeñas en cuanto a número de muestras, ya que obtiene una buena precisión necesitando pocos datos de entrenamiento. Por otro lado, la aproximación basada en deep learning permite obtener buenos resultados para bases de datos grandes con la ventaja de que el tamaño de entrada puede ser muy pequeño, permitiendo una ejecución muy rápida. El enfoque incremental está especialmente indicado para entornos en los que se requieran añadir nuevos sujetos al sistema sin tener que entrenar el método de nuevo debido a los altos costes de tiempo y energía. Por último, el estudio de consumo nos ha permitido definir una serie de recomendaciones para poder minimizar el consumo de energía durante el entrenamiento de las redes profundas sin penalizar la precisión de las mismas. Fecha de lectura de Tesis Doctoral: 14 de diciembre 2018.Arquitectura de Computadores Resumen tesis: La identificación automática de personas está ganando mucha importancia en los últimos años ya que se puede aplicar en entornos que deben ser seguros (aeropuertos, centrales nucleares, etc) para agilizar todos los procesos de acceso. La mayoría de soluciones desarrolladas para este problema se basan en un amplio abanico de características físicas de los sujetos, como pueden ser el iris, la huella dactilar o la cara. Sin embargo, este tipo de técnicas tienen una serie de limitaciones ya que requieren la colaboración por parte del sujeto a identificar o bien son muy sensibles a cambios en la apariencia. Sin embargo, el reconocimiento del paso es una forma no invasiva de implementar estos controles de seguridad y, adicionalmente, no necesita la colaboración del sujeto. Además, es robusto frente a cambios en la apariencia del individuo ya que se centra en el movimiento. El objetivo principal de esta tesis es desarrollar un nuevo método para la identificación de personas a partir de la forma de caminar en entornos de múltiples vistas. Como entrada usamos el flujo óptico que proporciona una información muy rica sobre el movimiento del sujeto mientras camina. Para cumplir este objetivo, se han desarrollado dos técnicas diferentes: una basada en un enfoque tradicional de visión por computador donde se extraen manualmente características que definen al sujeto y, una segunda aproximación basada en aprendizaje profundo (deep learning) donde el propio método extrae sus características y las clasifica automáticamente. Además, para este último enfoque, se ha desarrollado una implementación basada en aprendizaje incremental para añadir nuevas clases sin entrenar el modelo desde cero y, un estudio energético para optimizar el consumo de energía durante el entrenamiento

Covariate-invariant gait recognition using random subspace method and its extensions

Compared with other biometric traits like fingerprint or iris, the most significant advantage of gait is that it can be used for remote human identification without cooperation from the subjects. The technology of gait recognition may play an important role in crime prevention, law enforcement, etc. Yet the performance of automatic gait recognition may be affected by covariate factors such as speed, carrying condition, elapsed time, shoe, walking surface, clothing, camera viewpoint, video quality, etc. In this thesis, we propose a random subspace method (RSM) based classifier ensemble framework and its extensions for robust gait recognition. Covariates change the human gait appearance in different ways. For example, speed may change the appearance of human arms or legs; camera viewpoint alters the human visual appearance in a global manner; carrying condition and clothing may change the appearance of any parts of the human body (depending on what is being carried/wore). Due to the unpredictable nature of covariates, it is difficult to collect all the representative training data. We claim overfitting may be the main problem that hampers the performance of gait recognition algorithms (that rely on learning). First, for speed-invariant gait recognition, we employ a basic RSM model, which can reduce the generalisation errors by combining a large number of weak classifiers in the decision level (i.e., by using majority voting). We find that the performance of RSM decreases when the intra-class variations are large. In RSM, although weak classifiers with lower dimensionality tend to have better generalisation ability, they may have to contend with the underfitting problem if the dimensionality is too low. We thus enhance the RSM-based weak classifiers by extending RSM to multimodal-RSM. In tackling the elapsed time covariate, we use face information to enhance the RSM-based gait classifiers before the decision-level fusion. We find significant performance gain can be achieved when lower weight is assigned to the face information. We also employ a weak form of multimodal-RSM for gait recognition from low quality videos (with low resolution and low frame-rate) when other modalities are unavailable. In this case, model-based information is used to enhance the RSM-based weak classifiers. Then we point out the relationship of base classifier accuracy, classifier ensemble accuracy, and diversity among the base classifiers. By incorporating the model-based information (with lower weight) into the RSM-based weak classifiers, the diversity of the classifiers, which is positively correlated to the ensemble accuracy, can be enhanced. In contrast to multimodal systems, large intra-class variations may have a significant impact on unimodal systems. We model the effect of various unknown covariates as a partial feature corruption problem with unknown locations in the spatial domain. By making some assumptions in ideal cases analysis, we provide the theoretical basis of RSM-based classifier ensemble in the application of covariate-invariant gait recognition. However, in real cases, these assumptions may not hold precisely, and the performance may be affected when the intra-class variations are large. We propose a criterion to address this issue. That is, in the decision-level fusion stage, for a query gait with unknown covariates, we need to dynamically suppress the ratio of the false votes and the true votes before the majority voting. Two strategies are employed, i.e., local enhancing (LE) which can increase true votes, and the proposed hybrid decision-level fusion (HDF) which can decrease false votes. Based on this criterion, the proposed RSM-based HDF (RSM-HDF) framework achieves very competitive performance in tackling the covariates such as walking surface, clothing, and elapsed time, which were deemed as the open questions. The factor of camera viewpoint is different from other covariates. It alters the human appearance in a global manner. By employing unitary projection (UP), we form a new space, where the same subjects are closer from different views. However, it may also give rise to a large amount of feature distortions. We deem these distortions as the corrupted features with unknown locations in the new space (after UP), and use the RSM-HDF framework to address this issue. Robust view-invariant gait recognition can be achieved by using the UP-RSM-HDF framework. In this thesis, we propose a RSM-based classifier ensemble framework and its extensions to realise the covariate-invariant gait recognition. It is less sensitive to most of the covariate factors such as speed, shoe, carrying condition, walking surface, video quality, clothing, elapsed time, camera viewpoint, etc., and it outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms significantly on all the major public gait databases. Specifically, our method can achieve very competitive performance against (large changes in) view, clothing, walking surface, elapsed time, etc., which were deemed as the most difficult covariate factors