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.