JointsGait:A model-based Gait Recognition Method based on Gait Graph Convolutional Networks and Joints Relationship Pyramid Mapping

TL;DR

JointsGait introduces a novel gait recognition method using 2D joint data and graph convolutional networks, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness against external factors like clothing and view variations.

Contribution

The paper proposes JointsGait, a new model-based gait recognition approach utilizing gait graph convolutional networks and a joint relationship pyramid mapping to improve recognition accuracy from 2D joints.

Findings

Achieves high recognition accuracy on Kinect Gait Biometry Dataset.

Outperforms existing model-based methods on CASIA-B across all walking conditions.

Surpasses some appearance-based methods despite using only 2D joint data.

Abstract

Gait, as one of unique biometric features, has the advantage of being recognized from a long distance away, can be widely used in public security. Considering 3D pose estimation is more challenging than 2D pose estimation in practice , we research on using 2D joints to recognize gait in this paper, and a new model-based gait recognition method JointsGait is put forward to extract gait information from 2D human body joints. Appearance-based gait recognition algorithms are prevalent before. However, appearance features suffer from external factors which can cause drastic appearance variations, e.g. clothing. Unlike previous approaches, JointsGait firstly extracted spatio-temporal features from 2D joints using gait graph convolutional networks, which are less interfered by external factors. Secondly, Joints Relationship Pyramid Mapping (JRPM) are proposed to map spatio-temporal gait features into a discriminative feature space with biological advantages according to the relationship of human joints when people are walking at various scales. Finally, we design a fusion loss strategy to help the joints features to be insensitive to cross-view. Our method is evaluated on two large datasets, Kinect Gait Biometry Dataset and CASIA-B. On Kinect Gait Biometry Dataset database, JointsGait only uses corresponding 2D coordinates of joints, but achieves satisfactory recognition accuracy compared with those model-based algorithms using 3D joints. On CASIA-B database, the proposed method greatly outperforms advanced model-based methods in all walking conditions, even performs superior to state-of-art appearance-based methods when clothing seriously affect people's appearance. The experimental results demonstrate that JointsGait achieves the state-of-art performance despite the low dimensional feature (2D body joints) and is less affected by the view variations and clothing variation.