Modelling the effects of walking speed on appearance-based gait recognition

Researchers in the gait community propose various features, either appearance or model based, which they believe encode certain individual traits. One of the main assumptions made in many gait recognition techniques is constant walking-speed. Even though the gait patterns are repeatable, changes in walking speed can influence the gait patterns themselves. In this work we explore how changes in walking speed affect gait parameters in terms of recognition performance. A speed-varying walking database was collected to allow us to investigate and quantify the impact of speed on gait recognition methodically. We develop a normalization procedure, which maps gait features across speeds, and demonstrate their utility in previously proposed appearance-based gait recognition methods.