Gait Recognition in the Wild: A Benchmark

Gait benchmarks empower the research community to train and evaluate high-performance gait recognition systems. Even though growing efforts have been devoted to cross-view recognition, academia is restricted by current existing databases captured in the controlled environment. In this paper, we contribute a new benchmark for Gait REcognition in the Wild (GREW). The GREW dataset is constructed from natural videos, which contains hundreds of cameras and thousands of hours streams in open systems. With tremendous manual annotations, the GREW consists of 26K identities and 128K sequences with rich attributes for unconstrained gait recognition. Moreover, we add a distractor set of over 233K sequences, making it more suitable for real-world applications. Compared with prevailing predefined cross-view datasets, the GREW has diverse and practical view variations, as well as more natural challenging factors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale dataset for gait recognition in the wild. Equipped with this benchmark, we dissect the unconstrained gait recognition problem. Representative appearance-based and model-based methods are explored, and comprehensive baselines are established. Experimental results show (1) The proposed GREW benchmark is necessary for training and evaluating gait recognizer in the wild. (2) For state-of-the-art gait recognition approaches, there is a lot of room for improvement. (3) The GREW benchmark can be used as effective pre-training for controlled gait recognition. Benchmark website is https://www.grew-benchmark.org/.