Occlusion detection and gait silhouette reconstruction from degraded scenes

Gait, which is defined as the style of walking of a person, has been recognized as a potential biometric feature for identifying human beings. The fundamental nature of gait biometric of being unconstrained and captured often without a subject's knowledge or co-operation has motivated many researchers over the last one decade. However, all of the approaches found in the literature assume that there is little or no occlusion present at the time of capturing gait images, both during training and during testing and deployment. We look into this challenging problem of gait recognition in the presence of occlusion. A novel approach is proposed, which first detects the presence of occlusion and accordingly extracts clean and unclean gait cycles from the whole input sequence. In the second step, occluded silhouette frames are reconstructed using Balanced Gaussian Process Dynamical Model (BGPDM). We evaluated our approach on a new data set TUM-IITKGP featuring inter-object occlusion. Algorithms have also been tested on CMU's Mobo data set by introducing synthetic occlusion of different degrees. The proposed approach shows promising result on both the data sets.