GaitSnippet: Gait Recognition Beyond Unordered Sets and Ordered Sequences

Recent advancements in gait recognition have significantly enhanced performance by treating silhouettes as either an unordered set or an ordered sequence. However, both set-based and sequence-based approaches exhibit notable limitations. Specifically, set-based methods tend to overlook short-range temporal context for individual frames, while sequence-based methods struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies effectively. To address these challenges, we draw inspiration from human identification and propose a new perspective that conceptualizes human gait as a composition of individualized actions. Each action is represented by a series of frames, randomly selected from a continuous segment of the sequence, which we term a snippet. Fundamentally, the collection of snippets for a given sequence enables the incorporation of multi-scale temporal context, facilitating more comprehensive gait feature learning. Moreover, we introduce a non-trivial solution for snippet-based gait recognition, focusing on Snippet Sampling and Snippet Modeling as key components. Extensive experiments on four widely-used gait datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and, more importantly, highlight the potential of gait snippets. For instance, our method achieves the rank-1 accuracy of 77.5% on Gait3D and 81.7% on GREW using a 2D convolution-based backbone.

Beyond Face Swapping: A Diffusion-Based Digital Human Benchmark for Multimodal Deepfake Detection

In recent years, the rapid development of deepfake technology has given rise to an emerging and serious threat to public security: diffusion model-based digital human generation. Unlike traditional face manipulation methods, such models can generate highly realistic videos with consistency through multimodal control signals. Their flexibility and covertness pose severe challenges to existing detection strategies. To bridge this gap, we introduce DigiFakeAV, the first large-scale multimodal digital human forgery dataset based on diffusion models. Employing five latest digital human generation methods (Sonic, Hallo, etc.) and voice cloning method, we systematically produce a dataset comprising 60,000 videos (8.4 million frames), covering multiple nationalities, skin tones, genders, and real-world scenarios, significantly enhancing data diversity and realism. User studies show that the confusion rate between forged and real videos reaches 68%, and existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection models exhibit large drops in AUC values on DigiFakeAV, highlighting the challenge of the dataset. To address this problem, we further propose DigiShield, a detection baseline based on spatiotemporal and cross-modal fusion. By jointly modeling the 3D spatiotemporal features of videos and the semantic-acoustic features of audio, DigiShield achieves SOTA performance on both the DigiFakeAV and DF-TIMIT datasets. Experiments show that this method effectively identifies covert artifacts through fine-grained analysis of the temporal evolution of facial features in synthetic videos.

OmniDiff: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Fine-grained Image Difference Captioning

Image Difference Captioning (IDC) aims to generate natural language descriptions of subtle differences between image pairs, requiring both precise visual change localization and coherent semantic expression. Despite recent advancements, existing datasets often lack breadth and depth, limiting their applicability in complex and dynamic environments: (1) from a breadth perspective, current datasets are constrained to limited variations of objects in specific scenes, and (2) from a depth perspective, prior benchmarks often provide overly simplistic descriptions. To address these challenges, we introduce OmniDiff, a comprehensive dataset comprising 324 diverse scenarios-spanning real-world complex environments and 3D synthetic settings-with fine-grained human annotations averaging 60 words in length and covering 12 distinct change types. Building on this foundation, we propose M$^3$Diff, a MultiModal large language model enhanced by a plug-and-play Multi-scale Differential Perception (MDP) module. This module improves the model's ability to accurately identify and describe inter-image differences while maintaining the foundational model's generalization capabilities. With the addition of the OmniDiff dataset, M$^3$Diff achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, including Spot-the-Diff, IEdit, CLEVR-Change, CLEVR-DC, and OmniDiff, demonstrating significant improvements in cross-scenario difference recognition accuracy compared to existing methods. The dataset, code, and models will be made publicly available to support further research.

OpenGait: A Comprehensive Benchmark Study for Gait Recognition towards Better Practicality

Gait recognition, a rapidly advancing vision technology for person identification from a distance, has made significant strides in indoor settings. However, evidence suggests that existing methods often yield unsatisfactory results when applied to newly released real-world gait datasets. Furthermore, conclusions drawn from indoor gait datasets may not easily generalize to outdoor ones. Therefore, the primary goal of this work is to present a comprehensive benchmark study aimed at improving practicality rather than solely focusing on enhancing performance. To this end, we first develop OpenGait, a flexible and efficient gait recognition platform. Using OpenGait as a foundation, we conduct in-depth ablation experiments to revisit recent developments in gait recognition. Surprisingly, we detect some imperfect parts of certain prior methods thereby resulting in several critical yet undiscovered insights. Inspired by these findings, we develop three structurally simple yet empirically powerful and practically robust baseline models, i.e., DeepGaitV2, SkeletonGait, and SkeletonGait++, respectively representing the appearance-based, model-based, and multi-modal methodology for gait pattern description. Beyond achieving SoTA performances, more importantly, our careful exploration sheds new light on the modeling experience of deep gait models, the representational capacity of typical gait modalities, and so on. We hope this work can inspire further research and application of gait recognition towards better practicality. The code is available at https://github.com/ShiqiYu/OpenGait.

Disentangled Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation with Hierarchical Spatial and Temporal Denoiser

Recently, diffusion-based methods for monocular 3D human pose estimation have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance by directly regressing the 3D joint coordinates from the 2D pose sequence. Although some methods decompose the task into bone length and bone direction prediction based on the human anatomical skeleton to explicitly incorporate more human body prior constraints, the performance of these methods is significantly lower than that of the SOTA diffusion-based methods. This can be attributed to the tree structure of the human skeleton. Direct application of the disentangled method could amplify the accumulation of hierarchical errors, propagating through each hierarchy. Meanwhile, the hierarchical information has not been fully explored by the previous methods. To address these problems, a Disentangled Diffusion-based 3D Human Pose Estimation method with Hierarchical Spatial and Temporal Denoiser is proposed, termed DDHPose. In our approach: (1) We disentangle the 3D pose and diffuse the bone length and bone direction during the forward process of the diffusion model to effectively model the human pose prior. A disentanglement loss is proposed to supervise diffusion model learning. (2) For the reverse process, we propose Hierarchical Spatial and Temporal Denoiser (HSTDenoiser) to improve the hierarchical modeling of each joint. Our HSTDenoiser comprises two components: the Hierarchical-Related Spatial Transformer (HRST) and the Hierarchical-Related Temporal Transformer (HRTT). HRST exploits joint spatial information and the influence of the parent joint on each joint for spatial modeling, while HRTT utilizes information from both the joint and its hierarchical adjacent joints to explore the hierarchical temporal correlations among joints.

QAGait: Revisit Gait Recognition from a Quality Perspective

Gait recognition is a promising biometric method that aims to identify pedestrians from their unique walking patterns. Silhouette modality, renowned for its easy acquisition, simple structure, sparse representation, and convenient modeling, has been widely employed in controlled in-the-lab research. However, as gait recognition rapidly advances from in-the-lab to in-the-wild scenarios, various conditions raise significant challenges for silhouette modality, including 1) unidentifiable low-quality silhouettes (abnormal segmentation, severe occlusion, or even non-human shape), and 2) identifiable but challenging silhouettes (background noise, non-standard posture, slight occlusion). To address these challenges, we revisit gait recognition pipeline and approach gait recognition from a quality perspective, namely QAGait. Specifically, we propose a series of cost-effective quality assessment strategies, including Maxmial Connect Area and Template Match to eliminate background noises and unidentifiable silhouettes, Alignment strategy to handle non-standard postures. We also propose two quality-aware loss functions to integrate silhouette quality into optimization within the embedding space. Extensive experiments demonstrate our QAGait can guarantee both gait reliability and performance enhancement. Furthermore, our quality assessment strategies can seamlessly integrate with existing gait datasets, showcasing our superiority. Code is available at https://github.com/wzb-bupt/QAGait.

FastPoseGait: A Toolbox and Benchmark for Efficient Pose-based Gait Recognition

We present FastPoseGait, an open-source toolbox for pose-based gait recognition based on PyTorch. Our toolbox supports a set of cutting-edge pose-based gait recognition algorithms and a variety of related benchmarks. Unlike other pose-based projects that focus on a single algorithm, FastPoseGait integrates several state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms under a unified framework, incorporating both the latest advancements and best practices to ease the comparison of effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, to promote future research on pose-based gait recognition, we provide numerous pre-trained models and detailed benchmark results, which offer valuable insights and serve as a reference for further investigations. By leveraging the highly modular structure and diverse methods offered by FastPoseGait, researchers can quickly delve into pose-based gait recognition and promote development in the field. In this paper, we outline various features of this toolbox, aiming that our toolbox and benchmarks can further foster collaboration, facilitate reproducibility, and encourage the development of innovative algorithms for pose-based gait recognition. FastPoseGait is available at https://github.com//BNU-IVC/FastPoseGait and is actively maintained. We will continue updating this report as we add new features.

Free Lunch for Gait Recognition: A Novel Relation Descriptor

Gait recognition is to seek correct matches for query individuals by their unique walking patterns. However, current methods focus solely on extracting individual-specific features, overlooking inter-personal relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel $\textbf{Relation Descriptor}$ that captures not only individual features but also relations between test gaits and pre-selected anchored gaits. Specifically, we reinterpret classifier weights as anchored gaits and compute similarity scores between test features and these anchors, which re-expresses individual gait features into a similarity relation distribution. In essence, the relation descriptor offers a holistic perspective that leverages the collective knowledge stored within the classifier's weights, emphasizing meaningful patterns and enhancing robustness. Despite its potential, relation descriptor poses dimensionality challenges since its dimension depends on the training set's identity count. To address this, we propose the Farthest Anchored-gait Selection to identify the most discriminative anchored gaits and an Orthogonal Regularization to increase diversity within anchored gaits. Compared to individual-specific features extracted from the backbone, our relation descriptor can boost the performances nearly without any extra costs. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the popular GREW, Gait3D, CASIA-B, and OU-MVLP, showing that our method consistently outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performances.

Unsupervised Gait Recognition with Selective Fusion

Previous gait recognition methods primarily trained on labeled datasets, which require painful labeling effort. However, using a pre-trained model on a new dataset without fine-tuning can lead to significant performance degradation. So to make the pre-trained gait recognition model able to be fine-tuned on unlabeled datasets, we propose a new task: Unsupervised Gait Recognition (UGR). We introduce a new cluster-based baseline to solve UGR with cluster-level contrastive learning. But we further find more challenges this task meets. First, sequences of the same person in different clothes tend to cluster separately due to the significant appearance changes. Second, sequences taken from 0 and 180 views lack walking postures and do not cluster with sequences taken from other views. To address these challenges, we propose a Selective Fusion method, which includes Selective Cluster Fusion (SCF) and Selective Sample Fusion (SSF). With SCF, we merge matched clusters of the same person wearing different clothes by updating the cluster-level memory bank with a multi-cluster update strategy. And in SSF, we merge sequences taken from front/back views gradually with curriculum learning. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method in improving the rank-1 accuracy in walking with different coats condition and front/back views conditions.

Exploring Deep Models for Practical Gait Recognition

Gait recognition is a rapidly advancing vision technique for person identification from a distance. Prior studies predominantly employed relatively small and shallow neural networks to extract subtle gait features, achieving impressive successes in indoor settings. Nevertheless, experiments revealed that these existing methods mostly produce unsatisfactory results when applied to newly released in-the-wild gait datasets. This paper presents a unified perspective to explore how to construct deep models for state-of-the-art outdoor gait recognition, including the classical CNN-based and emerging Transformer-based architectures. Consequently, we emphasize the importance of suitable network capacity, explicit temporal modeling, and deep transformer structure for discriminative gait representation learning. Our proposed CNN-based DeepGaitV2 series and Transformer-based SwinGait series exhibit significant performance gains in outdoor scenarios, \textit{e.g.}, about +30\% rank-1 accuracy compared with many state-of-the-art methods on the challenging GREW dataset. This work is expected to further boost the research and application of gait recognition. Code will be available at https://github.com/ShiqiYu/OpenGait.