Cross-View Gait Recognition with Deep Universal Linear Embeddings

Gait is considered an attractive biometric identifier for its non-invasive and non-cooperative features compared with other biometric identifiers such as fingerprint and iris. At present, cross-view gait recognition methods always establish representations from various deep convolutional networks for recognition and ignore the potential dynamical information of the gait sequences. If assuming that pedestrians have different walking patterns, gait recognition can be performed by calculating their dynamical features from each view. This paper introduces the Koopman operator theory to gait recognition, which can find an embedding space for a global linear approximation of a nonlinear dynamical system. Furthermore, a novel framework based on convolutional variational autoencoder and deep Koopman embedding is proposed to approximate the Koopman operators, which is used as dynamical features from the linearized embedding space for cross-view gait recognition. It gives solid physical interpretability for a gait recognition system. Experiments on a large public dataset, OU-MVLP, prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.