EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 2004:4, 572–585 c 2004 Hindawi Publishing Corporation Gait Recognition Using Image Self-Similarity Chiraz BenAbdelkader Identix Corporation, One Exchange Place, Jersey City, NJ 07302, USA Email:
[email protected] Ross G. Cutler Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399, USA Email:
[email protected] Larry S. Davis Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA Email:
[email protected] Received 30 October 2002; Revised 18 May 2003 Gait is one of the few biometrics that can be measured at a distance, and is hence useful for passive surveillance as well as biometric applications. Gait recognition research is still at its infancy, however, and we have yet to solve the fundamental issue of finding gait features which at once have sufficient discrimination power and can be extracted robustly and accurately from low-resolution video. This paper describes a novel gait recognition technique based on the image self-similarity of a walking person. We contend that the similarity plot encodes a projection of gait dynamics. It is also correspondence-free, robust to segmentation noise, and works well with low-resolution video. The method is tested on multiple data sets of varying sizes and degrees of difficulty. Perfor- mance is best for fronto-parallel viewpoints, whereby a recognition rate of 98% is achieved for a data set of 6 people, and 70% for adatasetof54people. Keywords and phrases: gait recognition, human identification at a distance, human movement analysis, behavioral biometrics, pattern recognition. 1. INTRODUCTION (a well-advanced multidisciplinary field that spans kinesi- ology, physiotherapy, orthopedic surgery, ergonomics, etc.) 1.1.