3-D Gait Identification Utilizing Latent Canonical Covariates Consisting of Gait Features

Biometric gait recognition is a lesser-known but emerging and effective biometric recognition method which enables subjects’ walking patterns to be recognized. Existing research in this area has primarily focused on feature analysis through the extraction of individual features, which captures most of the information but fails to capture subtle variations in gait dynamics. Therefore, a novel feature taxonomy and an approach for deriving a relationship between a function of one set of gait features with another set are introduced. The gait features extracted from body halves divided by anatomical planes on vertical, horizontal, and diagonal axes are grouped to form canonical gait covariates. Canonical Correlation Analysis is utilized to measure the strength of association between the canonical covariates of gait. Thus, gait assessment and identification are enhanced when more semantic information is available through CCA-based multi-feature fusion. Hence, Carnegie Mellon University’s 3D gait database, which contains 32 gait samples taken at different paces, is utilized in analyzing gait characteristics. The performance of Linear Discriminant Analysis, K-Nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes, Artificial Neural Networks, and Support Vector Machines was improved by a 4% average when the CCA-utilized gait identification approach was used. A significant maximum accuracy rate of 97.8% was achieved through CCA-based gait identification. Beyond that, the rate of false identifications and unrecognized gaits went down to half, demonstrating state-of-the-art for gait identification.