Can gait biometrics be Spoofed?

Gait recognition is a relatively new biometrics and no effort has yet been devoted to studying spoofing attacks against video-based gait recognition systems. Spoofing occurs when a person tries to imitate the clothing and/or walking style of someone else in order to gain illegitimate access and advantages. To gain insight into the performance of current gait biometric systems when confronted to spoofing attacks, we provide in this paper the first investigation in the research literature on how clothing can be used to spoof a target and evaluate the performance of two state-of-the-art recognition methods on a novel gait spoofing database recorded at the University of Southampton. The experiments point out very interesting findings that can be used as a reference for future investigations by the research community.