Robust CNN-based Gait Verification and Identification using Skeleton Gait Energy Image

As a kind of behavioral biometric feature, gait has been widely applied for human verification and identification. Approaches to gait recognition can be classified into two categories: model-free approaches and model-based approaches. Model-free approaches are sensitive to appearance changes. For model-based approaches, it is difficult to extract the reliable body models from gait sequences. In this paper, based on the robust skeleton points produced from a two-branch multi-stage CNN network, a novel model-based feature, Skeleton Gait Energy Image (SGEI), has been proposed. Relevant experimental performances indicate that SGEI is more robust to the cloth changes. Another contribution is that two different CNN-based architectures have been separately proposed for gait verification and gait identification. Both these two architectures have been evaluated on the datasets. They have presented satisfying performances and increased the robustness for gait recognition in the unconstrained environments with view variances and cloth variances.