Fusion of gait and face for human identification

Identification of humans from arbitrary view points is an important requirement for different tasks including perceptual interfaces for intelligent environments, covert security and access control etc. For optimal performance, the system must use as many cues as possible and combine them in meaningful ways. In this paper, we discuss fusion of face and gait cues for the single camera case. We present a view invariant gait recognition algorithm for gait recognition. We employ decision fusion to combine the results of our gait recognition algorithm and a face recognition algorithm based on sequential importance sampling. We consider two fusion scenarios: hierarchical and holistic. The first involves using the gait recognition algorithm as a filter to pass on a smaller set of candidates to the face recognition algorithm. The second involves combining the similarity scores obtained individually from the face and gait recognition algorithms. Simple rules like the SUM, MIN and PRODUCT are used for combining the scores. The results of fusion experiments are demonstrated on the NIST database which has outdoor gait and face data of 30 subjects.