Support Vector Regression for Multi-View Gait Recognition based on Local

Motion Feature Selection

Worapan Kusakunniran1,4 , Qiang Wu2 , Jian Zhang1,4 , and Hongdong Li3,4
1
School of Computer Science and Engineering - University of New South Wales,
2
School of Computing and Communications - University of Technology Sydney,
3
Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering - Australian National University,
and 4 National ICT Australia-NICTA
{worapan.kusakunniran@nicta.com.au, qiang.wu@uts.edu.au,
jian.zhang@nicta.com.au, and hongdong.li@nicta.com.au}

Abstract To overcome this difficulty, three major categories of

Gait is a well recognized biometric feature that is used
to identify a human at a distance. However, in real envi-
ronment, appearance changes of individuals due to viewing
angle changes cause many difficulties for gait recognition.
This paper re-formulates this problem as a regression prob-
lem. A novel solution is proposed to create a View Trans-
formation Model (VTM) from the different point of view us-
ing Support Vector Regression (SVR). To facilitate the pro-
cess of regression, a new method is proposed to seek lo-
cal Region of Interest (ROI) under one viewing angle for
predicting the corresponding motion information under an-
other viewing angle. Thus, the well constructed VTM is able
to transfer gait information under one viewing angle into
another viewing angle. This proposal can achieve view-
independent gait recognition. It normalizes gait features
under various viewing angles into a common viewing angle
before similarity measurement is carried out. The exten-
sive experimental results based on widely adopted bench-
mark dataset demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can
achieve significantly better performance than the existing
methods in literature.
1. Introduction
Gait has recently gained considerable attention from hu-
man identification field because it is one biometric feature
that can be efficiently recognized at a distance. It has been
be well analyzed and recognized by computer vision proce-
dure according to global shape statistic, motion frequency,
and temporal and spatial changes of human bodies.
In real application, appearance changes due to a change
of viewing angle or walking direction is one of the main
difficulties for gait recognition. This is because a person can
walk freely in any direction within a single camera’s field of
view. Viewing angle may also change when a person walks
from one camera into another camera with different settings
of parameters. Gait recognition accuracy drops drastically
when viewing angle is changed [2] [15].
methods have been investigated recently. The first category
is to perform gait recognition under calibrated multi-camera
system. This kind of approach requires complicated multi-
ple cameras setting instead of simple single camera system.
A gait feature can be reconstructed under any view using 3D
structure information. Bodor et al. [3] applied image-based
rendering to reconstruct gait feature for any required view-
ing angle. It combined several gaits which were acquired by
various cameras under the different views. Shakhnarovich
et al. [8] and Lee [12] invented an image-based visual hull
(IBVH) to render visual views for gait recognition. IBVH
was computed from a set of monocular views captured from
multiple cameras which can be rendered simultaneously.
Although this category of approaches can provide a reli-
able performance, they require costly complicated setup of
a cooperating multi-camera system.
In the second category, gait feature invariant to view-
ing angle change is developed. Jean et al. [4] introduced
a method to compute and evaluate view-normalized trajec-
tories of pedestrian body parts obtained from monocular
video sequences. It used feet and head 2D-trajectories from
tracked silhouettes to segment the walking trajectory into
piecewise linear segments. The normalized trajectories are
invariant to viewing angle since they always appear like be-
ing seen from a frontal-parallel viewpoint. However, this
technique works well only for a limited range of viewing
angles. It is because that the duration of self-occlusion inter-
vals is not longer than the duration of time intervals where
both feet are visible. Kale et al. [6] developed a method
to synthesize images of arbitrary-view from an image under
particular view through perspective projection in a sagittal
plane. This approach significantly drops in performance in
case of a self-occlusion when an angle between image plane
and the sagittal plane is large.
The third category is to transform gait features from one
viewing angle to another one which has been observed in

978-1-4244-6985-7/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE 974

the gallery data. Thus, gait similarity measurement can be
carried out by a standard method. It uses a simpler single
camera system, when being compared with a complicated
multi-camera system of the first category. In addition, it
creates a more stable gait recognition system which is not
sensitive to noise when being compared with the system ob-
tained from the second category. The method proposed in
this paper belongs to this third category.
Typical methods in the third category established a View
Transformation Model (VTM) through a matrix factoriza-
tion process by adopting Singular Value Decomposition
(SVD) technique [7] [10] [14]. The method proposed in
[14] created a VTM using a static image on spatial domain,
while [10] used a frequency-domain gait feature that ob-
tained through Fourier Transformation. To improve recog-
nition rate, Gait Energy Image (GEI) optimized by Linear
Discriminant Analysis (LDA) operation was built up be-
fore constructing VTM [7]. These methods [7], [10], [14]
created a matrix which each row contains gait information
from same viewing angle but different subjects, and each
column contains gait information from same subject but
different viewing angles. Then, SVD factorized the gait
matrix into view independent and subject independent sub-
matrices. These sub-matrices are used to construct VTM
for multi-view gait recognition.
These methods assume that the gait feature matrix in the
training dataset can be completely decomposed into view
independent sub-matrix and subject independent sub-matrix
respectively without overlapping elements. This assump-
tion has not been clearly verified mathematically. Hence, it
would not guarantee an optimized VTM. Moreover, these
methods always used global feature, a complete silhouette,
to perform view transformation. Global feature might also
include noise and uncertainty due to other changes of en-
vironments. It cannot effectively deal with partial occlu-
sion either. In addition, the size of VTM in these methods
not only depends on gait feature dimension but also size of
training dataset. Normally, in order to obtain a well con-
structed VTM, a large training dataset is required. Hence,
the size of VTM can be large as well, which leads to un-
popular computational complexity. These drawbacks will
be tackled in this paper by re-formulate the problem of gait
recognition of various views as a regression problem.
In this paper, we propose a new approach in which Gait
Energy Image (GEI) is first constructed using silhouettes
obtained from complete walking cycle(s) of a walking hu-
man. Then, a set of VTMs based on GEI are created. Each
VTM will be used for view transformation between a pair
of viewing angles. To facilitate the process of regression, a
new method is proposed to seek local motion feature under
one viewing angle, Region of Interest (ROI), for predicting
the corresponding motion information under another view-
ing angle. The carefully selected ROI is able to regressively
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predict gait information on the target viewing angle. More-
over, such kind of regression relation defined is regardless
of the subjects observed. In our study, Support Vector Re-
gression (SVR) is used as a regression tool because of the
well recognized advantages.
Compared with the existing VTMs based on SVD, this
new view transformation is carried out at the fundamental
and visible feature domain, GEI. Thus, potentially, the per-
formance can be further improved by adopting refining op-
eration on GEI. Moreover, this proposed approach is less
sensitive to noise since regression is carried out between
the reference point and a locally selected ROI, regardless
of global gait feature. In addition, the computational com-
plexity can be well controlled since the size of VTM only
depends on the size of ROI and the number of support vec-
tors. The proposed approach performs significantly better
than the existing methods in the same category.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Basic tech-
niques and gait feature extraction are described in section 2
and section 3 respectively. Detailed construction of VTM
is explained in section 4. Gait similarity measurement is
stated in section 5. Experimental results are analyzed in
section 6 and conclusion is drawn in section 7.
2. Basic techniques
This section describes two knowledge concepts: Support
Vector Regression (SVR) and VTM construction based on
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). SVR is a regression
tool adopted in the proposed approach. SVD based VTM
construction [7][10] is a baseline method for performance
comparison on multi-view gait recognition.
2.1. Regression for VTM construction
To achieve gait measurement between different viewing
angles, it is re-formulated as a regression problem. Particu-
larly, SVR has been adopted as a regression tool considering
its advantages on several aspects.
2.1.1 Problem re-formulation
In the proposal, a view transformation of gait feature is
re-formulated as a regression problem. A set of VTMs is
constructed for multi-view gait recognition. Each VTM is
used to transfer gait feature under one viewing angle into
another viewing angle. A VTM consists of multiple regres-
sion processes. Each regression process aims to predict a
target pixel on GEI under target viewing angle from a se-
lected ROI on GEI under source viewing angle. ROI is
carefully selected based on local motion relationship.
In statistics, a regression process focuses on the relation-
ship between a dependent variable (a target pixel on GEI
under a viewing angle) and independent variables (a se-
lected ROI on GEI under another viewing angle). Regres-
sion analysis will estimate the conditional expectation of the
target pixel given the ROI. Thus, if a proper ROI can be lo-
cated, the constructed VTM based on these regressive rela-
tionships can efficiently transform gait feature from source
viewing angle to target viewing angle.
As a regression tool, SVR is chosen for the proposed ap-
proach because of the following advantages [11]. First, it
features in good generalization performance. This is core
requirement for most regression application including this
research. Secondly, its representation is sparse. This is be-
cause a regression model obtained by SVR depends only
on a subspace of the training dataset. Therefore, dimension
of VTM is sparse and controllable. Thirdly, unlike some
other regression tools such as neural network, SVR does
not have a local minimum problem. Its solution is unique
and globally optimal. Hence, we can obtain a global op-
timized version of VTM based on the supplied context of
training data. Fourthly, SVR is a kernel-based regression
technique. Thus, it allows the system to work with arbitrary
large feature space, not limited to just input space by using
linear kernel.
2.1.2 SVR
SVR concept is briefly explained in the followings,
more details can be referred to [13]. Given the data
as {Si : (xi , yi ) |xi ∈ X, yi ∈ R, i = 1...k}, where X de-
notes the space of input patterns and k is the number of
sample. Regression equation f (x) for describing the case
of linear function is defined as:
f (x) = < w, x > + b (1)
where w ∈ X, b ∈ R, and < ·, · > denotes the dot product
in X.
Figure 1. The soft margin loss setting for SVR
In -SVR [13] as shown in Figure 1, the goal is to find a
function f (x) that satisfies the following three fundamental
aspects. First, error from the difference between observed
target yi and predicted value f (xi ) is disregarded as long
as it is less than . Secondly, the most possible flatness
is attempted by minimizing the norm ||w||2 =< w, w >.
Thirdly, the soft margin loss function is allowed. One can
introduce slack variables ξ, ξ ∗ to cope with data points that
lies outside the absolute  regions. Hence,  − SV R arrives
at the objective formulation as:
1 2
Pk ∗
minimize  2 ||w|| + C i=1 (ξi + ξi )
 yi − < w, xi > − b ≤  + ξi
subject to < w, xi > + b − yi ≤  + ξi∗ (2)

ξi , ξi∗ ≥ 0
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where constant C determines the trade-off between the flat-
ness of f and the amount up to which deviations larger than
 are tolerated.
The optimization problem (2) can be solved more easily
in its dual formulation. Thus, a standard dualization method
utilizing Lagrange multipliers is used and yields the dual
optimization problem as:
( Pk
− 21 i,j=1 (αi − αi∗ )(αj − αj∗ ) < xi , xj >
maximize Pk Pk
− i=1 (αi + αi∗ ) + i=1 yi (αi − αi∗ )
Pk ∗ ∗
i=1 (αi − αi ) = 0, αi , αi ∈ [0, C]
subject to (3)
where αi , αi∗ ≥ 0 are Lagrange multipliers.
The support vector expansion also can be obtained where
the w can be completely described as a linear combination
of the training pattern x as:
Pk
w = i=1 (αi − αi∗ )xi (4)
Moreover, the complete algorithm can be described in
terms of dot products between the data as:
Pk
f (x) = i=1 (αi − αi∗ ) < xi , x > + b (5)
The concept described above can be considered as a lin-
ear kernel-based SVR. To apply a non-linear kernel to SVR,
in equations (3) and (5), the dot products < xi , xj > for
linear kernel are replaced with alternative kernel k(xi , xj ).
Two non-linear kernels [1] are used in this study. The first
kernel is polynomial of degree d which can be defined as:
polynomial
Kd,s,k (xi , xj ) = (s < xi , xj > + k)d (6)
The degree of the polynomial kernel controls the flexi-
bility of the resulting regression models. The lowest degree
polynomial is the linear kernel, which is not sufficient when
a nonlinear relationship between features exists. The sec-
ond kernel that is widely used is the Gaussian or Radius
Basic Function (RBF). RBF is defined as:
KσRBF (xi , xj ) = exp(− σ1 ||xi − xj ||2 ) (7)
The σ > 0 is a parameter that controls width of Gaussian,
which plays a similar role as degree of polynomial kernel.
σ in the Gaussian kernel and d in the polynomial kernel
determine the flexibility of the produced SVR in fitting the
data. Larger d or smaller σ may lead to over-fitting.
2.2. SVD based VTM construction and its limitation
For any given matrix A ∈ Rn×m , it has a decomposition
A = U SV T such that U is an (n × n) orthogonal matrix
called Left Singular Vectors of A, S is an (n × m) matrix
with non-negative diagonal entries which are singular val-
ues of A, and V is an (m × m) orthogonal matrix called
Right Singular Vectors of A. SVD can perform factoriza-
tion of matrix A. The diagonal values of S are the square
roots of the Eigenvalues of AT A and AAT . Consequently,
the left singular vectors are eigenvectors of AT A and the
right singular vectors are eigenvectors of AAT .
 To adopt SVD for VTM construction [7], [10], [14], the
first step is to build gait matrix A. In the matrix, each row
contains gait information from same viewing angle of the
different subjects and each column contains gait informa-
tion from same subject under the different angles. Then
SVD can factorize the gait matrix A into view-independent
sub-matrix and subject-independent sub-matrix. Let gθki be
a gait signature of subject k under viewing angle θi . The
factorization process by SVD is as:
gθ11 ... gθK1
 
Pθ1
 
 . . .   .

 = U SV T =  .
 
 v 1 ... v K

. . . (8)
  
 
 . . .   . 
gθ1 ... gθK PθI
I I
A vector v k is an intrinsic gait feature of the k th subject
for any viewing angle. Pθi is a projection matrix which can
project intrinsic vector v of any subject to the gait feature
vector under a specific viewing angle θi . Thus, gait feature
can be written in factorized form as:
gθki = Pθi v k (9)
The subject-independent matrix P is used as a VTM in
common for any subject. For example, gait feature transfor-
mation from viewing angle θi to θj is obtained by:
gθkj = Pθj Pθ+i gθki
where Pθ+i is the pseudo inverse matrix of Pθi .
There are three main limitations in VTM construction
based on SVD factorization process [10]. First, from
equation (8), the method claims P = U S as a subject-
independent sub-matrix and V T as a view-independent sub-
matrix. However, this claim is lack of concrete proof from
a mathematic point of view. Thus, there is no promise to
obtain an optimized VTM. Secondly, from equation (8), di-
mension of matrix P is (IxNg )xK and dimension of ma-
trix V is KxK, where I is the total number of observed
viewing angles, Ng is a gait dimension, and K is the to-
tal number of training data. Thus, size of VTM clearly de-
pends on the number of training data which can lead to huge
memory consuming and high complexity problems when a
system requires a huge training dataset for training process.
Thirdly, a gait feature (gθki ) is a global feature which is sen-
sitive to background noise and any defection in any local
area such as partial occlusion.
3. Gait feature extraction
Gait is a periodic action. Therefore, gait analysis should
be operated within complete walking cycle(s). This paper
adopts the method from [7] to determine the period of each
gait sequence. The idea is to build a waveform of aspect ra-
tio: width/height of silhouette bounding box, along the time
of image sequence. Then normalization and autocorrelation
processes are applied to the waveform to obtain the repeated
curve pattern, which may indicate the gait period.
Then the proposed approach captures the gait informa-
tion in spatial domain through Gait Energy Image (GEI) [7].
Figure 2 illustrates the example of GEI under various view-
ing angles of three different subjects.
Figure 2. Spatial-domain GEI under various viewing angles
Figure 2 shows that the appearance-based GEI varies on
different viewing angles. So it is not efficient to directly
measure the similarity between two GEIs under different
views. Thus, in the proposed approach, a constructed VTM
is required to transform a GEI to be under the view as same
as another GEI before the similarity is measured.
4. View transformation model construction
Let V T Mθi →θj denotes a view transformation model
that is used to transform GEI from view θi to θj , gθki denotes
a GEI of subject k under view θi , pkθi denotes pth pixel of
gθki , and ROIpθki denotes a region of interest or group of
(10) θj
pixels on gθki regarding relations with a pixel pkθj .
As mentioned in section 2.1.1, a V T Mθi →θj consists of
multiple regression processes. Each regression process is
used to predict each pixel value on gθkj from relevant pixels
on gθki . The regression model f is defined as:
pkθj ≈ f (θi , θj , k, p) =< w, ROIpθki > + b (11)
θj
This equation is equivalent to standard regression equa-
tion (1) where x is ROIpθki and y is pkθj .
θj
To build up the VTM, the sufficient numbers of train-
ing pair (gθi , gθj ) from different subjects are required. The
regression technique used for training process is Support
Vector Regression (SVR). The three kernels (linear, poly-
nomial, and RBF) are attempted for this study.
In order to achieve reliable regression, a local ROI of rel-
evant pixels on gθi is selected to estimate a corresponding
target pixel p on gθj . Without reliable ROI, the regression
process will definitely fail. In addition, ROI or group of pix-
els is used, instead of just single pixel, to predict the target
pixel is because of the following two supporting reasons.
The first reason is to avoid variation and noise from indi-
vidual pixel. The second reason is that single source pixel
might not be efficient and robust to predict the target pixel.
The ROI is claimed to be able to predict motion informa-
tion of the pixel p. There are two main steps to obtain the
efficient ROI. The first step is to find ṕ on gθi . The position
ṕ is the closest estimated position on gθi for p. The ROI in
our study may contain consecutive pixels and also discon-
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nected pixels. In the second step of ROI selection, we aim
to locate all these pixels in the neighboring region of ṕ.
4.1. Estimation of ṕ
The pixel ṕ is not always located at the same coordi-
nate as the pixel p. This is because GEIs under two views
(gθi , gθj ) may have different 2D display structures. The
GEIs are classified into four categories according to the
walking directions of subjects (see Figure 3). Moreover,
in this study, a GEI is divided into six independent areas by
one vertical cut and two horizontal cuts as shown in Figure
3. These three cuts are not trivial, but generated from mo-
tion information and geometric distribution of human body
parts.
Figure 3. The top row shows the four possible walking direction types.
The bottom row shows examples GEI displays of the four types. In the
top row, dash arrow is a walking direction, a gray vertical line is an optical
axis, and a green horizontal line is an image plane. In the bottom row, a
blue vertical line is used for side segmentation and red horizontal lines are
used for body part segmentation.
A GEI is divided into two sides by a vertical cut. The
vertical cut, called major axis, is calculated from eigenvec-
tor of covariance matrix of the tracked silhouette [9]. For
each camera viewing angle, major axes calculated from dif-
ferent sample silhouettes can be slightly different. Thus, the
average (in terms of the axis’s slope) is used as a represen-
tative major axis of GEI under the camera viewing angle.
Four possible 2D displays of walking manners regarding
of vertical cut are shown in Figure 3. Each GEI must belong
to one of these four manners. The first two cases usually
occur when a person walks within ±18◦ away from camera
optical axis. Major axis divides a GEI into “Left” side and
“Right” side. The first case is walking away from a camera.
The second case is walking toward a camera. The last two
cases occur when a person walks at angle larger than ±18◦
away from camera optical axis. Major axis divides a GEI
into “Front” side and “Back” side. The third case is walking
from left side to right side of a camera, while the fourth case
is walking from right side to left side of a camera.
Next, two horizontal cuts are used to divide human body
into 3 major parts, head (hair + face), upper body (torso +
arms) and lower body (legs + feet). Portions of human body
of GEIs under two views can be significantly different when
the two views are captured from different cameras with dif-
ferent parameters setting. For each viewing angle, the aver-
age portion of body parts segmentation are estimated based
978
on training data.
To obtain the two horizontal cuts, GEI is first projected
on major axis to create a histogram. Then, smooth the his-
togram by average filter. Example results are shown in Fig-
ure 4.
Figure 4. Projection histograms for body part segmentation process. Blue
line is a border between head and upper body and red line is a border
between upper body and lower body.
A border between head and upper body is at the first sad-
dle point from top to bottom or from head to feet. A border
between upper body and lower body is claimed to be at the
hip which is approximately located at the peak position of
the histogram based on the observation (see Figure 4).
As the result from one vertical cut and two horizontal
cuts, a GEI is divided into six areas. The next step is to pro-
cess the area matching between gθi and gθj . For vertical cut,
the sides between two views have to be correctly matched
in terms of a walking direction. According to Figure 3,
if a view transformation is conducted between/inside the
first two cases, “Left” side must match with “Left” side and
“Right” side must match with “Right” side. If a view trans-
formation is conducted between/inside the last two cases,
“Front” side must match with “Front” side and “Back” side
must match with “Back” side. For horizontal cuts, body part
areas between two views have to be correctly matched. For
example, upper body area of gθi has to be simply matched
with upper body area of gθj .
Figure 5. ROI selection: p is a target pixel under view θj , ṕ is an estimated
position under view θi of p, and yellow area is the candidate pixels for
ROIp
Let Ai is an area from view θi that is likely to contain a
pixel p from area Aj of view θj . For example as shown in
Figure 5, if p is in the front-lower body area under view θj ,
then ṕ must also be in the front-lower body area but under
view θi . The area Ai and area Aj may contain different size
and shape because they are captured under different views
or different cameras. Thus, position of ṕ in Ai is the corre-
sponding position of p in Aj , which is proportional to the
sizes of the areas.
4.2. Selection of ROI elements
Let Ac be a local region that contains ṕ and its neighbor-
ing pixels. Then the ROI of T pixels is defined as:
ROI = {p∗1 , p∗2 , ..., p∗T } , p∗t ∈ Ac (12)
where p∗t is a pixel that is one of the T highest values of
|COR(p∗t , p)|, COR(·, ·) is correlation coefficient of the
two variables. This provides the T most relevant pixels that
have closest motion relationship with the pixel p. The size,
T , of the ROI is decided based on cross validation tests.
Figure 6 shows examples of ROI selections based on the
proposed method.
Figure 6. The first row is the ROI selection for V T M36◦ →54◦ and the
second row is the ROI selection for V T M18◦ →162◦ . For each row, the
first image contains the allocated ROI (red pixels) for predicting the cor-
responding target pixel (red pixel) as shown in second image. The third
image shows the relationship between the target pixel (y-axis) and the se-
lected pixel from corresponding source ROI (x-axis) from various pairs of
training samples (gθk , gθk ).
i j
4.3. Multi-view to one-view transformation
In practice, one-view to one-view transformation is not
precise enough. This is because the orthogonality is degen-
erated when processing 2D silhouette image. To overcome
this problem, a gait feature under one particular angle can
be estimated from the features under multiple views. For
example, two gait features under view θi and θm are trans-
formed to the feature under view θj as:
pkθj ≈ < w, ROIpθki : ROIpθkm > + b (13)
θj θj
where “:” is special concatenation between the two ROI
vectors such that the operator selects T pixels that have T
highest correlations with the target pixel and T is the size of
final ROI for regression.
In our study, it is seen that gaits from multiple views
provide more sufficient information. Thus, equation (13)
will generate more precise view transformation results.
5. Gait similarity measurement
This paper focuses on investigating the performance of
new VTM construction. To achieve similarity measure-
ments, the simple but widely adopted Euclidean distance is
used. Once two gait features under the same viewing angle,
g i and g j , are obtained. The similarity of the two features
(g i , g j ) is linearly measured as follows:
v ing time for one VTM using the proposed method is ap-
uN
uX
i j 2
d(g , g ) = t (g i (n) − g j (n)) (14)
n=1
where d(g , g ) is a distance between gait signatures g i and
i j
g j . N is dimension of gait feature. The smaller value of d,
the more possibility that gait signatures g i and g j belong to
the same subject.
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6. Experimental results
The publically available CASIA gait database B was
used for our experiments. It contains 124 subjects. The
gait data was captured from 11 viewing angles, namely 0◦ ,
18◦ , 36◦ , 54◦ , 72◦ , 90◦ , 108◦ , 126◦ , 144◦ , 162◦ , and 180◦ .
There are 6 video sequences for each person under each dif-
ferent viewing angle. Therefore, we use a total of 11x124x6
or 8184 gait sequences. The dataset is divided into 2 groups.
The first group contains 24 subjects for VTM construction
process. The second group contains the rest 100 subjects
for performance evaluate on multi-views gait recognition.
Implementation of SVR is based on the well known
SVM-Light Support Vector Machine library [5]. The
proposed SVR-based method requires tuning of SVR-
parameters such as  in equation (2), C in equation (3), d in
equation (6), and σ in equation (7). Some parameters can be
roughly estimated based on each specific case of the VTM
construction. For example,  should be larger to construct
the VTM for the pair of viewing angles that have larger dif-
ference. The SVR model should be more flexible than the
model for closer viewing angles. Besides, d or the degree
of polynomial kernel and σ or the width of RBF kernel can
be adjusted based on over-fitting of the regression models
on validation dataset.
The experiments were carried out using SVR with three
different kernels (linear, polynomial and RBF). The perfor-
mance based on proposed technique (SVR) and the methods
(SVD) [7][10] are compared. The method [7] applied SVD
on optimized GEI while the method [10] applied SVD on
frequency-domain gait feature. Figure 7 shows examples of
transformed GEI images using the proposed technique.
Figure 7. (a) is g0◦ . (b), (c) and (d) are transformed g18◦ from g0◦ by
using SVR with linear, polynomial, and RBF kernels respectively. (e) is
g18◦ . (f) is g126◦ . (g), (h) and (i) are transformed g108◦ from g126◦ by
using SVR with linear, polynomial, and RBF kernels respectively. (j) is
g108◦ .
The experiments were completed using the computer
machine with Quad Processor 2.66 GHz and 4 GB Ram.
The size of GEI is 30×30 pixels and the size of ROI is 30
pixels. Based on the mentioned specifications, the train-
proximately 10-20 minutes. It depends on the setting of
SVR-parameters and the choice of SVR-kernel. In addition,
the performance and complexity of the proposed method as
well depends on the dimension of GEI, the size of ROI, and
the context and the number of training gait dataset.
Figure 8 illustrates the first rank or the top one gait
identity matching for multi-view gait recognition by using
Figure 8. Comparisons of first rank multi-view gait recognition performances between the proposed approaches (linear-SVR,
polynomial-SVR, RBF-SVR) and the methods (SVD[7], SVD[10]) from literature

Figure 9. CMS curves for multi-view gait recognitions using multi-view to one-view transformation based on RBF kernel
based-SVR

980
five different methods, linear-SVR, polynomial-SVR, RBF-
SVR, SVD [7], and SVD [10]. For each bar chart in Figure
8, probe data under one particular viewing angle is trans-
formed to a feature set under another view that matches one
of the views from gallery data. Then the gait similarity is
measured to determine the multi-view gait recognition rate.
In Figure 9, Cumulative Match Scores (CMS) are used to
demonstrate the results of multi-view to one-view transfor-
mation based on RBF-SVR method. The CMS with rank r
means the top r matches must include the real identity.
From the experimental results, we can conclude the fol-
lowing key points. (1) RBF kernel provides the highest
accuracy, then follows by polynomial and linear kernels
respectively. (2) Being compared with SVD based ap-
proaches [7][10], the proposed method (RBF-SVR) signifi-
cantly improves multi-view gait recognition performance.
The RBF-SVR achieves the accuracy up to 95% for the
close viewing angles (18◦ difference). However, SVD[7]
and SVD[10] can only achieve up to 85% of accuracy and
70% of accuracy respectively. (3) Figure 9 shows that the
multi-view gait recognition performance of milti-view to
one-view transformation is significantly better than one-
view to one-view transformation. In addition, the proposed
approach (RBF-SVR) also performs better than the SVD
based methods [7][10] for multi-view to one-view transfor-
mation. (4) It is clearly seen from Figure 8 that transfor-
mation between the closer viewing angles results in a better
performance. This is because features under closer views
share more common gait information.
7. Conclusion
This paper has proposed a new multi-view gait recog-
nition using View Transformation Model (VTM) based on
Support Vector Regression (SVR). In our study, multi-view
gait recognition is re-formulated as a regression problem.
It is completely under different point of view when be-
ing compared with the typical SVD based method [7][10]
which considered multi-view gait recognition as a matrix
decomposition problem. In the proposal, a VTM is con-
structed from regression processes based on local motion
feature selection through GEIs. The well generated VTMs
can efficiently transform GEIs under various viewing an-
gles into a common viewing angle. Then gaits similarity
measurement can be conducted without difficulty.
The proposed approach has been verified with a large
multiple views gait database. Compared with the SVD
based method [7][10] , the proposed SVR based method sig-
nificantly improves the performance of the multi-view gait
recognition. In addition, by using local feature, the pro-
posed view transformation system is more robust to noise.
Beside, its complexity is controllable because it does not re-
quire any camera calibration and complicated multi-camera
system.
981
Acknowledgement
1. NICTA is funded by the Australian Government as represented by
the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital
Economy and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Cen-
tre of Excellence program.
2. Portions of the research in this paper use the CASIA Gait Database
collected by Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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