Gait recognition is a non-intrusive biometric technique for security applications, yet existing studies are dominated by silhouette- and parsing-based representations. Silhouettes are sparse and miss internal structural details, limiting discriminability. Parsing enriches silhouettes with part-level structures, but relies heavily on upstream human parsers (e.g., label granularity and boundary precision), leading to unstable performance across datasets and sometimes even inferior results to silhouettes. We revisit gait representations from a structural perspective and describe a design space defined by edge density and supervision form: silhouettes use sparse boundary edges with weak single-label supervision, while parsing uses denser cues with strong semantic priors. In this space, we identify an underexplored paradigm: dense part-level structure without explicit semantic labels, and introduce SKETCH as a new visual modality for gait recognition. Sketch extracts high-frequency structural cues (e.g., limb articulations and self-occlusion contours) directly from RGB images via edge-based detectors in a label-free manner. We further show that label-guided parsing and label-free sketch are semantically decoupled and structurally complementary. Based on this, we propose SKETCHGAIT, a hierarchically disentangled multi-modal framework with two independent streams for modality-specific learning and a lightweight early-stage fusion branch to capture structural complementarity. Extensive experiments on SUSTech1K and CCPG validate the proposed modality and framework: SketchGait achieves 92.9% Rank-1 on SUSTech1K and 93.1% mean Rank-1 on CCPG.
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Ford Research and Innovation Center（福特研究与创新中心）
Gait, the walking pattern of individuals, is one of the most important biometrics modalities. Most of the existing gait recognition methods take silhouettes or articulated body models as the gait features. These methods suffer from degraded recognition performance when handling confounding variables, such as clothing, carrying and view angle. To remedy this issue, we propose a novel AutoEncoder framework to explicitly disentangle pose and appearance features from RGB imagery and the LSTM-based integration of pose features over time produces the gait feature. In addition, we collect a Frontal-V…
SRM Institute of Science and Technology（SRM科学技术学院）；Instituto Superior Técnico, Univ. of Lisbon（里斯本大学高等技术学院）
Biometrics plays a significant role in vision-based surveillance applications. Soft biometrics such as gait is widely used with face in surveillance tasks like person recognition and re-identification. Nevertheless, in practical scenarios, classical fusion techniques respond poorly to changes in individual users and in the external environment. To this end, we propose a novel adaptive multi-biometric fusion strategy for the dynamic incorporation of gait and face biometric cues by leveraging keyless attention deep neural networks. Various external factors such as viewpoint and distance to the c…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
The key challenge in designing a sketch representation lies with handling the abstract and iconic nature of sketches. Existing work predominantly utilizes either, (i) a pixelative format that treats sketches as natural images employing off-the-shelf CNN-based networks, or (ii) an elaborately designed vector format that leverages the structural information of drawing orders using sequential RNN-based methods. While the pixelative format lacks intuitive exploitation of structural cues, sketches in vector format are absent in most cases limiting their practical usage. Hence, in this paper, we pro…
Gait, the walking pattern of individuals, is one of the important biometrics modalities. Most of the existing gait recognition methods take silhouettes or articulated body models as gait features. These methods suffer from degraded recognition performance when handling confounding variables, such as clothing, carrying and viewing angle. To remedy this issue, we propose a novel AutoEncoder framework, GaitNet, to explicitly disentangle appearance, canonical and pose features from RGB imagery. The LSTM integrates pose features over time as a dynamic gait feature while canonical features are avera…
Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Sketch recognition remains a significant challenge due to the limited training data and the substantial intra-class variance of freehand sketches for the same object. Conventional methods for this task often rely on the availability of the temporal order of sketch strokes, additional cues acquired from different modalities and supervised augmentation of sketch datasets with real images, which also limit the applicability and feasibility of these methods in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel sketch-specific data augmentation (SSDA) method that leverages the quantity and quality o…
Single-Stream Multi-Feature Fusion with Temporal Robustness for Gait Emotion Recognition
College of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University（西南大学计算机与信息科学学院）；College of Physical Science and Technology, Southwest University（西南大学物理科学与技术学院）；Wisesoft Inc.（四川川大智胜软件股份有限公司）
Improving the generalization of gait recognition with limited datasets
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；Department of Automation, School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学自动化系）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Study, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)（电子科技大学深圳研究院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech)（南方科技大学计算机科学与工程系）
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, China（南方科技大学计算机科学与工程系）；National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data System Computing Technology, Shenzhen University, China（大数据系统计算技术国家工程实验室，深圳大学）；Shenzhen Polytechnic University, China（深圳职业技术大学）；Zhejiang University, China（浙江大学）；Alibaba Group, China（阿里巴巴集团）
Sketches are the most abstract 2D representations of real-world objects. Although a sketch usually has geometrical distortion and lacks visual cues, humans can effortlessly envision a 3D object from it. This suggests that sketches encode the information necessary for reconstructing 3D shapes. Despite great progress achieved in 3D reconstruction from distortion-free line drawings, such as CAD and edge maps, little effort has been made to reconstruct 3D shapes from free-hand sketches. We study this task and aim to enhance the power of sketches in 3D-related applications such as interactive desig…
Person Recognition at Altitude and Range: Fusion of Face, Body Shape and Gait
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University（计算机科学与工程系，密歇根州立大学）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University（电气与计算机工程学院，普渡大学）；School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech（交互计算学院，佐治亚理工学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin（电气与计算机工程系，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
