Persistent homology-based gait recognition robust to upper body variations

Abstract

Gait recognition is nowadays an important biometric technique for video surveillance tasks, due to the advantage of using it at distance. However, when the upper body movements are unrelated to the natural dynamic of the gait, caused for example by carrying a bag or wearing a coat, the reported results show low accuracy. With the goal of solving this problem, we apply persistent homology to extract topological features from the lowest fourth part of the body silhouettes. To obtain the features, we modify our previous algorithm for gait recognition, to improve its efficacy and robustness to variations in the amount of simplices of the gait complex. We evaluate our approach using the CASIA-B dataset, obtaining a considerable accuracy improvement of 93:8%, achieving at the same time invariance to upper body movements unrelated with the dynamic of the gait.