An approach for gait anonymization using deep learning

The human gait has become another biometrie trait used in security systems because it is unique to each person and can be recognized at a distance. However, a bad actor could use a gait recognition system to identify a person on the basis of his or her gait. We have developed a gait anonymization method that prevents unauthorized gait recognition. It modifies the gait so that the person cannot be identified while maintaining the naturalness of the gait. The modification is done by adding another gait, called "noise gait". A convolutional neural network makes this modification by taking two gaits as input, the original gait and the noise gait, and outputting an anonymized gait. The proposed method was evaluated using the success rate and mean opinion score (MOS). The success rate is the rate of failed gait recognition, and the MOS is a measure of the naturalness of the anonymized gait. In our experiments, the success rate achieved 98.86% at most while the highest naturalness score is 3.73 in the MOS scale. These findings should open new research directions regarding privacy protection related to gait recognition.