Gait Recognition Based on Normal Distance Maps

Gait is a commonly used biometric for human recognition. Its main advantage relies on its ability to identify people at distances at which other biometrics fail. In this paper, we develop a new approach for gait recognition that combines the distance transform with curvatures of local contours. We call our gait feature template the normal distance map. Our method encodes both body shapes and boundary curvatures into a novel feature descriptor that is more robust than existing gait representations. We evaluate our approach on the widely used and challenging USF and CASIA-B datasets. Furthermore, we evaluate it on the OU-ISIR gait dataset, the largest one available in the literature, to obtain statistically reliable results. We verify our approach is significantly superior to the current state-of-the-art under most conditions.