Human Gait Recognition via Sparse Discriminant Projection Learning

As an important biometric feature, human gait has great potential in video-surveillance-based applications. In this paper, we focus on the matrix representation-based human gait recognition and propose a novel discriminant subspace learning method called sparse bilinear discriminant analysis (SBDA). SBDA extends the recently proposed matrix-representation-based discriminant analysis methods to sparse cases. By introducing the L₁ and L₂ norms into the objective function of SBDA, two interrelated sparse discriminant subspaces can be obtained for gait feature extraction. Since the optimization problem has no closed-form solutions, an iterative method is designed to compute the optimal sparse subspace using the L₁ and L₂ norms sparse regression. Theoretical analyses reveal the close relationship between SBDA and previous matrix-representation-based discriminant analysis methods. Since each nonzero element in each subspace is selected from the most important variables/factors, SBDA is potential to perform equivalent to or even better than the state-of-the-art subspace learning methods in gait recognition. Moreover, using the strategy of SBDA plus linear discriminant analysis (LDA), we can further improve the performance. A set of experiments on the standard USF HumanID and CASIA gait databases demonstrate that the proposed SBDA and SBDA + LDA can obtain competitive performance.