A study on gait-based gender classification

  • Authors:

  • Shiqi Yu;Tieniu Tan;Kaiqi Huang;Kui Jia;Xinyu Wu

  • Affiliations:

  • National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Integration Technology, CAS, CUHK, Shenzhen, China;National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Integration Technology, CAS, CUHK, Shenzhen, China;Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Integration Technology, CAS, CUHK, Shenzhen, China

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Gender is an important cue in social activities. In this correspondence, we present a study and analysis of gender classification based on human gait. Psychological experiments were carried out. These experiments showed that humans can recognize gender based on gait information, and that contributions of different body components vary. The prior knowledge extracted from the psychological experiments can be combined with an automatic method to further improve classification accuracy. The proposed method which combines human knowledge achieves higher performance than some other methods, and is even more accurate than human observers. We also present a numerical analysis of the contributions of different human components, which shows that head and hair, back, chest and thigh are more discriminative than other components. We also did challenging cross-race experiments that used Asian gait data to classify the gender of Europeans, and vice versa. Encouraging results were obtained. All the above prove that gait-based gender classification is feasible in controlled environments. In real applications, it still suffers from many difficulties, such as view variation, clothing and shoes changes, or carrying objects. We analyze the difficulties and suggest some possible solutions.