Human gait recognition in canonical space using temporal templates

A system for automatic gait recognition without segmentation of particular body parts is described. Eigenspace transformation (EST) has already proved useful for several tasks including face recognition, gait analysis, etc; it is optimal in dimensionality reduction by maximising the total scatter of all classes but is not optimal for class separability. A statistical approach that combines EST with canonical space transformation (CST) is proposed for gait recognition using temporal templates from a gait sequence as features. This method can be used to reduce data dimensionality and to optimise the class separability of different gait sequences simultaneously. Incorporating temporal information from optical-flow changes between two consecutive spatial templates, each temporal template extracted from computation of optical flow is projected from a high-dimensional image space to a single point in a low-dimensional canonical space. Using template matching, recognition of human gait becomes much faster and simpler in this new space. As such, the combination of EST and CST is shown to be of considerable potential in an emerging new biometric.