Abstract

We present a novel approach to gait recognition that con- siders gait sequences as cyclostationary processes on a shape space of simple closed curves. Consequently, gait analysis reduces to quantifying differences between statistics underlying these stochastic processes. The main steps in the proposed approach are: (i) off-line extraction of hu- man silhouettes from IR video data, (ii) use of piecewise-geodesic paths, connecting the observed shapes, to smoothly interpolate between them, (iii) computation of an average gait cycle within class (i.e. associated with a person) using average shapes, (iv) registration of average cycles using linear and nonlinear time scaling, (iv) comparisons of average cy- cles using geodesic lengths between the corresponding registered shapes. We illustrate this approach on infrared video clips involving 26 sub jects.