Gait recognition is to seek correct matches for query individuals by their unique walking patterns at a long distance. However, current methods focus solely on individual gait features, disregarding inter-personal relationships. In this paper, we reconsider gait representation, asserting that gait is not just an aggregation of individual features, but also the relationships among different subjects' gait features once reference gaits are established. From this perspective, we redefine classifier weights as reference-anchored gaits, allowing each person's gait to be described by their relationship with these references. In our work, we call this novel descriptor Relationship Descriptor (RD). This Relationship Descriptor offers two benefits: emphasizing meaningful features and enhancing robustness. To be specific, The normalized dot product between gait features and classifier weights signifies a similarity relation, where each dimension indicates the similarity between the test sample and each training ID's gait prototype, respectively. Despite its potential, the direct use of relationship descriptors poses dimensionality challenges since the dimension of RD depends on the training set's identity count. To address this, we propose a Farthest Anchored gaits Selection algorithm and a dimension reduction method to boost gait recognition performance. Our method can be built on top of off-the-shelf pre-trained classification-based models without extra parameters. We show that RD achieves higher recognition performance than directly using extracted features. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the popular GREW, Gait3D, CASIA-B, and OU-MVLP, showing that our method consistently outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performances.

Gait recognition research using relationship descriptors to enhance recognition performance by considering inter-personal relationships among different subjects' gait features.

步态识别的免费午餐：一种新的关系描述符