Gait Quality Aware Network: Toward the Interpretability of Silhouette-Based Gait Recognition

Gait recognition receives increasing attention since it can be conducted at a long distance in a nonintrusive way and applied to the condition of changing clothes. Most existing methods take the silhouettes of gait sequences as the input and learn a unified representation from multiple silhouettes to match probe and gallery. However, these models are all faced with the lack of interpretability, e.g., it is not clear which silhouette in a gait sequence and which part in the human body are relatively more important for recognition. In this work, we propose a gait quality aware network (GQAN) for gait recognition which explicitly assesses the quality of each silhouette and each part via two blocks: frame quality block (FQBlock) and part quality block (PQBlock). Specifically, FQBlock works in a squeeze-and-excitation style to recalibrate the features for each silhouette, and the scores of all the channels are added as frame quality indicator. PQBlock predicts a score for each part which is used to compute the weighted distance between the probe and gallery. Particularly, we propose a part quality loss (PQLoss) which enables GQAN to be trained in an end-to-end manner with only sequence-level identity annotations. This work is meaningful by moving toward the interpretability of silhouette-based gait recognition, and our method also achieves very competitive performance on CASIA-B and OUMVLP.