You are how you walk: Uncooperative MoCap gait identification for video surveillance with incomplete and noisy data

This work offers a design of a video surveillance system based on a soft biometric — gait identification from MoCap data. The main focus is on two substantial issues of the video surveillance scenario: (1) the walkers do not cooperate in providing learning data to establish their identities and (2) the data are often noisy or incomplete. We show that only a few examples of human gait cycles are required to learn a projection of raw MoCap data onto a low-dimensional subspace where the identities are well separable. Latent features learned by Maximum Margin Criterion (MMC) method discriminate better than any collection of geometric features. The MMC method is also highly robust to noisy data and works properly even with only a fraction of joints tracked. The overall workflow of the design is directly applicable for a day-to-day operation based on the available MoCap technology and algorithms for gait analysis. In the concept we introduce, a walker's identity is represented by a cluster of gait data collected at their incidents within the surveillance system: They are how they walk.