Existing deep learning methods have made significant progress in gait recognition. Typically, appearance-based models binarize inputs into silhouette sequences. However, mainstream quantization methods prioritize minimizing task loss over quantization error, which is detrimental to gait recognition with binarized inputs. Minor variations in silhouette sequences can be diminished in the network's intermediate layers due to the accumulation of quantization errors. To address this, we propose a differentiable soft quantizer, which better simulates the gradient of the round function during backpropagation. This enables the network to learn from subtle input perturbations. However, our theoretical analysis and empirical studies reveal that directly applying the soft quantizer can hinder network convergence. We further refine the training strategy to ensure convergence while simulating quantization errors. Additionally, we visualize the distribution of outputs from different samples in the feature space and observe significant changes compared to the full precision network, which harms performance. Based on this, we propose an Inter-class Distance-guided Distillation (IDD) strategy to preserve the relative distance between the embeddings of samples with different labels. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating state-of-the-art accuracy across various settings and datasets. The code will be made publicly available.

使用软量化器和距离引导蒸馏策略，在步态识别中实现关键词所示的深度学习方法，并验证了其在各种设置和数据集上的最先进准确性。

QGait: 用于步态识别的准确量化和二值化输入