Identification of people by analysis of gait patterns extracted from video has recently become a popular research problem. However, the conditions under which the problem is "solvable" are not understood or characterized. To provide a means for measuring progress and characterizing the properties of gait recognition, we introduce the HumanID Gait Challenge Problem. The challenge problem consists of a baseline algorithm, a set of 12 experiments, and a large data set. The baseline algorithm estimates silhouettes by background subtraction and performs recognition by temporal correlation of silhouettes. The 12 experiments are of increasing difficulty, as measured by the baseline algorithm, and examine the effects of five covariates on performance. The covariates are: change in viewing angle, change in shoe type, change in walking surface, carrying or not carrying a briefcase, and elapsed time between sequences being compared. Identification rates for the 12 experiments range from 78 percent on the easiest experiment to 3 percent on the hardest. All five covariates had statistically significant effects on performance, with walking surface and time difference having the greatest impact. The data set consists of 1,870 sequences from 122 subjects spanning five covariates (1.2 Gigabytes of data). The gait data, the source code of the baseline algorithm, and scripts to run, score, and analyze the challenge experiments are available at http://www.GaitChallenge.org. This infrastructure supports further development of gait recognition algorithms and additional experiments to understand the strengths and weaknesses of new algorithms. The more detailed the experimental results presented, the more detailed is the possible meta-analysis and greater is the understanding. It is this potential from the adoption of this challenge problem that represents a radical departure from traditional computer vision research methodology.

We offer a novel representation scheme for view-based motion analysis using just the change in the relational statistics among the detected image features, without the need for object models, perfect segmentation, or part-level tracking. We model the relational statistics using the probability that a random group of features in an image would exhibit a particular relation. To reduce the representational combinatorics of these relational distributions, we represent them in a Space of Probability Functions (SoPF), where the Euclidean distance is related to the Bhattacharya distance between probability functions. Different motion types sweep out different traces in this space. We demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of this representation in the context of recognizing persons from gait. In particular, on outdoor sequences: (1) we demonstrate the possibility of recognizing persons from not only walking gait, but running and jogging gaits as well; (2) we study recognition robustness with respect to view-point variation; and (3) we benchmark the recognition performance on a database of 71 subjects walking on soft grass surface, where we achieve around 90 percent recognition rates in the presence of viewpoint variation.

In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to discriminate between high level motion types such as walking, jogging, or running based on just the change in the relational statistics among the detected image features, without the need for object models, perfect segmentation, or tracking. Instead of the statistics of the feature attributes themselves, we consider the distribution of the statistics of the relations among the features. We represent the observed distribution of feature relations in an image as a point in a space where the Euclidean distance is related to the Bhattacharya distance between probability functions. Different motion types sweep out different traces in this Space of Probability Functions (SoPF). We demonstrate the effectiveness of this representation on image sequences of human in motion, gathered using a digital video camera. We show that it is not only possible to distinguish between motion types but also to discriminate between persons based on the SoPF traces.