Gender recognition from gait using radon transform and relevant component analysis

Abstract

In this paper, a new method for gender recognition via gait silhouettes is proposed. In the feature extraction process, Radon transform on all the 180 angle degrees is applied to every silhouette to construct gait templates and the initial phase of each silhouette in an entire gait cycle is also associated to the templates representing dynamic information of walking. Then the Relevant Component Analysis (RCA) algorithm is employed on the radon-transformed templates to get a maximum likelihood estimation of the within class covariance matrix. At last, the Mahalanobis distances are calculated to measure gender dissimilarity in recognition. The Nearest Neighbor (NN) classifier is adopted to determine whether a sample in the Probe Set is male or female. Experimental results in comparison to state-of-the-art methods show considerable improvement in recognition performance of our proposed algorithm. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.