A New Approach for Gender Classication Based on Gait Analysis

Maodi Hu, Yunhong Wang

School of Computer Science and Engineer
Beihang University, Beijing, 100191
londeehu@gmail.com, yhwang@buaa.edu.cn

AbstractIn this paper, we propose a novel pattern to

represent spatio-temporal information of gait appearance
which is called Gait Principal Component Image (GPCI).
GPCI is a grey-level image which compresses the spatiotemporal information by amplifying the dynamic variation of
different body part. The detection of gait period is based on
LLE coefcients and it is also a new attempt. KNN classier
is employed for gender classication. The framework can
be applied in real-time setting because of its rapidity and
robustness. The experimental results on IRIP Gait Database
(32 males, 28 females) show that the proposed approach
achieves a high accuracy in automatic gender classication.
Keywords-gait; gender classication; principal component;
LLE coefcients;

I. I NTRODUCTION
Gait, referring to the pattern of walking or locomotion,
has been used as an efcient biometric feature in human
identication [1]. Recently, with the growing demands
in recognition and classication of the side and longrange surveillance video, gait has become a hot research
topic. Gait information has more advantages than face
in these cases. X.Li et al.[2] summarized the limitations
of other biometric features, like face, ngerprint, iris,
and handwriting. Distance between camera / scanner and
people, people cooperation, Peoples attention impede the
acquisition of the traditional features to make identication
or classication.
Gait, is considered to contain gender information as
face does. X.Li et al. [2] described their analysis in
effectiveness of the seven human gait components for
gender recognition. We can see that all body segments
(head, arm, trunk, thigh, front-leg, back-leg, and feet)
have their contribution to gender classication. In [3] [4],
L.Lee et al. proposed a gait representation by tting each
ellipse to seven parts of silhouette, and features are the
parameters of these seven ellipses. In [5], J.H.Yoo et al.
used a sequential set of 2D stick gure to represent the gait
signature, then SVM classier was employed to classify
gender on a considerably large database, but the number
of males is much larger than that of females. As many
large gait database always have more males than females.
We have collected a gait database with similar number of
men and women which named IRIP Gait Database [6], and
used for doing research on recognition and classication.
S.Lee et al. [7] denes one gait cycle as the period
starting from a double support stance frame with left
foot forward to the next. As most of feature extraction
methods used in gait recognition and gender classication

are based on period detection, accurate gait period has

become one of the most fundamental demands in preprocessing procedure. S.Sarkar et al. [8] use the variation
of foreground pixels number to estimate the state that
two legs are farthest apart or overlap, but it does not
work well when the silhouettes are not integrated. The
false period estimation and detection may fatally block the
automated process based on known period. In this paper,
we propose a new gait period detection approach based on
LLE coefcients to solve this problem. The comparison of
the two approaches will be presented in the section 3. The
result of this period extraction method is very effective in
our experiment.
The spatio-temporal information was extracted from the
image sequence through various ways. Some approaches
use shape cues, like body height, width [9], angular
[10], Radon Transform [11], frieze patterns[12], ellipses
t [3][4], etc. Some refer to image differences and self
similarity cues, such as the shape variation-based frieze
patterns [7]. And Nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique [13], Manifold Learning and HMM [14] have been
used to extract spatio-temporal information recently. But
most of these approaches are not suitable for gender
classication in real-time monitoring. We put forward a
new gait representation for gender classication, called
Gait Principal Component Image (GPCI), to depict the
physical changes in one gait period. Experimental results
for gender classication by GPCI are encouraging.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section
2, we summarize the gender classication framework. In
Section 3, a comparison of the proposed period extraction
methods with existing algorithms is made. Section 4
describes the proposed gait presentation GPCI and the
performance of our algorithm in IRIP Gait Database is
shown in Section 5.
II. OVERVIEW OF THE FRAMEWORK
The proposed gender classication algorithm could be
divided into the following four steps:
1.Background subtraction and Image sequences preprocessing
2.Gait period extraction
3.Generate GPCI
4.Gender Classication.
To get silhouettes, we employed a simple subtraction
method to separate foreground and morphological ltering
to reduce noise after binarization. Then the foreground and

(a)
2200

Numer of Pixels in Lower Portion

2100
2000
1900
1800
1700
1600
1500
1400
1300

10

20

30

40
Frame Index

50

60

70

80

40
50
Frame Index

60

70

80

(b)
1.5
1

Figure 1.

Flow diagram of proposed algorithm

LLE Coeffcient

0.5
0
0.5
1
1.5

background can be separated by following equation 1.

||fi (x, y) fk (x, y)|| k , background
(1)
||fi (x, y) fk (x, y)|| > k , f oreground
fk (x, y) is the i-th frame of a given video sequence and
fk (x, y) is the mean value of rst k frames in the given
sequence is. k denotes the square deviation of the rst k
frames. To reduce noise, some morphology methods, such
as erosion and dilation were used to erase the small spots
on the binarilized image and to x discontinuous point
on the contour. the last step of generating silhouette is to
align center of each silhouette to the middle of the Image.
Since we get the silhouettes, the proposed period detection method is employed to extract gait sequences over
each period. Then GPCI are generated to represent the
spatio-temporal information. Finally, KNN will be used
to classify the gender. The steps are shown by Figure 1.
III. G AIT PERIOD DETECTION
A. Period extraction based on pixels number
Gait period can be extracted from the silhouette sequence by counting the number of foreground pixels in
each frame over time. S. Sarkar et al. [8] use the following
approach to detect the period. They demonstrated that
the number of foreground pixels will reach a maximum
in full stride stance and drop to a minimum in heels
together stance, and the variation of the pixels number
mainly affected the legs, which are selected by considering
only the bottom half of the silhouette. But in practice, the
period cant always be estimated by this approach because
the silhouette is not perfect, especially for the real-time
monitoring applications.

10

20

30

(c)
Figure 2. Silhouette frames and corresponding number of pixels (6th
person in IRIP Gait Database), LLE coefcients (a) 1st, 9th, 17th, 25th,
33rd, 41st, 49th, 57th and 65th silhouette frame (b)number of pixels in
Lower 53% portion (c)one dimensional LLE coefcient

The Figure 2(b) shows the number of pixels in lower

53% portion of body (body part below the waist accounts
for the entire proportion is about 53% based on anatomical
knowledge), which is calculated from the 6th person in
IRIP Gait Database, the variation curve of the number of
whole bodys pixels is very similar. We can hardly extract
the authentic period from it.
If the gait cycle cant be extracted, these methods will
only depend on manual period extraction, and it will be
hard to do the gait recognition or gender classication
automatically.
B. Period extraction based on LLE
LLE [15] is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction
method to map high dimensional image sequence to low
dimensional manifold. A linear approximation of LLE to
solve linearization problem has been proposed in [16],
LEA can nds the corresponding low-dimensional point
on manifold via the linear projection. T.Ding [13] has
demonstrated that LLE is capable of extracting the spatiotemporal variation information of gait silhouette. The
one dimensional LLE coefcient sequences of the gait
sequence of Figure 2(a) shown in Figure 2(c) is more

crosscorrelation sequence

0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8

10

20

30

40
lag + 35

50

60

70

80

Figure 3. Normalized auto-correlation over the range of lags -35 to 35

convenient to observe the period than Figure 2 (b). So

the period can be extracted from the LLE coefcient
sequences.
As [15] described, LLE recovers global nonlinear structure from locally linear ts. Firstly, assign K nearest
neighbors to each data point; Secondly, Compute the
weights W by solving a least-squares problem represented
by equation 2.
arg min
W

Mi


|Xi

=1

K


W Xi |

(2)

=1

Xi is the original -th frame in the i-th gait sequence.

Mi is frames number of the sequence. The value of K
has great impact on the computing time. Through our
experiments, 8 is enough in this application.
Thirdly, compute the best low dimensional representing
vectors Y by minimizing the following equation 3.
(W ) =

Mi

=1

|Yi

K


W Yi |2

(3)

=1

Figure 3. is the auto-correlation sequence of LLE coefcients Yi in Figure 2.(c), from which we can gure out the
period clearly from the local maxima points. Because the
left leg forwarding half gait cycle and right one forwarding
half cycle are almost the same in the database, the span
between two local maxima is the number of frames over
half a period. So the second local maxima point in the
right half of the peak is the frames number in one period.
To test this algorithm, we apply it on IRIP Gait
Database, in which the number of frames in one period
ranges from 18 to 34. We test it on the 0 degree, 30 degree,
60 degree, 90 degree-1, 90 degree-2, 120 degree, 150
degree, 180 degree gait silhouette, and the experimental
results will be shown in the section 5.
The proposed gait representation method does not need
to assign full stride stance or heels together stance to be
the starting point. For some other gait representation needs
exactly the same starting and ending stance, maxima or

Figure 4. Gait silhouette image and GPCI: the rst row, 1st 5th 9th 13th
frame; the second row, 17th 21st 25th frame and GPCI of 28 frames in
a period

minima of LLE coefcients can be used. The following

feature extraction process will depend upon these automatic extracted periods.
IV. G AIT P RINCIPAL C OMPONENT I MAGE
As described before, the gait silhouette is used for
feature extraction and gender classication. We propose
a new spatio-temporal representation of gait, called Gait
Principal Component Image, which considers gait as a
sequence of silhouette frames, and represents the class
information of one gait period in a single image. Unlike
GEI [17], which calculates the average image, our new
approach is to concentrate on using PCA to amplify the
dynamic variation of different body part.
Dimensionality reduction algorithms are applicable to
map data into a space of much lower dimensionality.
PCA(Principal Components Analysis), as a stable unsupervised linear dimensionality reduction approach to discover
projection direction which achieves the smallest loss, has
been widely used to decorrelate data for classication.
P. S. Huang et al. [18] have applied PCA to reduce
gait silhouette Image dimensionality by projecting all the
silhouette of different persons into a low dimensional
space, so it can optimize the class separability of different
gait classes. Our approach is also based on PCA in the
same purpose, but in a very different way.
Suppose there are L periods of Gait Silhouette, and
the resolution of them is m*n. Ni is frames number in
the i-th period. Xij (1-by-mn vector) denotes the j-th
silhouette frame of the i-th period (such as row by row,
column by column). So Xi is an Ni-by-mn matrix, of
which each row is the values of pixels in the silhouettes
over a period. Let mXi (Ni -by-1 vector) to be the average
pixel value in each silhouette frame of the i-th period. 1Ni
denotes the 1-by-mn vector of ones. Then we use PCA as
the following sequence: Firstly, calculate the covariance
matrix Ri represented by the following equation 4.

Ri = (Xi mXi 1Ni )(Xi mXi 1Ni )T

mn

1
where, mXi T = { mn
Xijk }j=1...Ni

(4)

k=1

Ri is an Ni -by-Ni symmetric matrix. In IRIP Gait

Database, Ni is between 18 and 34. So the eigenvectors
of Ri can be calculated quickly with little calculating
amounts. Then get the eigenvector ui corresponding to
the largest eigen value of Ri by equation 5.
ui = EigenV ecteri,max(eigenvaluei )

(5)

Now we have got the base of 1 dimensional space which

shows the largest change between each pixel over one
period. The last step, equation 6 is to compute the vector
representation Yi in the 1 dimensional space.
Yi = ui T (Xi mXi 1Ni )

(6)

The Yi should be normalized to 0-255 by equation 7,

then it can be displayed as an Image.
Zi = 255

Yi min(Yi )
max(Yi ) min(Yi )

Figure 5. Gait Principal Component Image in different angle of view:

The rst row, C1: 0 degree, C2: 30 degree, C3: 60 degree, C4: 90 degree1; The second row, C5: 90 degree-2, C6: 120 degree, C7: 150 degree,
C8: 180 degree

(7)

Zi is our proposed gait representation of one period

sequences: GPCI. Thats the whole process to calculate. It
may need more calculating amounts than GEI, but it is also
efcient. It just costs less than 1 second to compute a GPCI
for one period in my personal computer (CPU: PD3.4G,
Memory: 1.5G). The last region of Figure 4 shows us
a GPCI in 90 degree angle of view computed from one
period sequences. Figure 5 demonstrate the GPCIs in 0 to
180 degree, which were captured by C1 to C8.
GPCI has stronger representation than GEI for gait
changes in sequence. For example, the sequence of one
binary pixel in the Image is 01101100; another one is
10010011. They have the same numbers of 1 and 0,
so their averages are the same. It means the two pixels
make no difference in GEI. But if we treat every digit as
an axis in the space, then we can nd the direction to make
all pixels have the greatest degree of distinction. And this
is how GPCI works.
In order to testify the usefulness of our proposed
approach and reduce the computing complexity, KNN
classier based on Euclidian Distance was employed to
the classication step. In next section, there will be some
experimental results to show its efciency.
V. E XPERIMENTAL RESULTS
In IRIP Gait Database, there are gait data collected from
60 volunteers, including 32 male subjects and 28 female
subjects aged between 22 and 28. Eight cameras were
placed at different angles recording the movement of a
person. These cameras were divided into two groups, each
of which consists of four cameras and forms a 1/4 circle.
The face of the person is captured by another camera from
the front view. The arrangement of these eight cameras is
illustrated in Figure 6. Cameras from C1 to C8 are used

Figure 6.

Cameras setup for data acquisition

to record human gait. Camera C9 records human face. We

dont use the data captured by C9 in this paper.
Automatic extraction of gait period by using LLE
coefcients have been applied on the 60 persons. For each
participant, there are ve sequences recorded the walking
pattern from left to right and right to left. In each sequence,
the gait silhouette captured from 8 cameras of different
degrees were all in the experiment (C1: 0 degree, C2: 30
degree, C3: 60 degree, C4: 90 degree-1, C5: 90 degree-2,
C6: 120 degree, C7 150 degree, C8: 180 degree). We nd
that the same algorithm on left to right walking and right
to left walking have the very similar correct rate in nearly
all the gait research. So we only apply our approach on
the left to right part.
In the 300 tested sequences (60 persons * 5 sequences
/ person), we think the following period length results are
incorrect:
1.Being smaller than 18 or larger than 34;
2.Difference from actual length of the period by visual
observation;
3.Do not exist a local maximum point in autocorrelation sequence except the middle point.
The correct rates in all the 8 angles of view are shown

Camera No.
C1
C2
C3
C4
C5
C6
C7
C8

Correct Rate
82%
99.33%
99.67%
100%
100%
100%
100%
91%

Incorrect Number
54
2
1
0
0
0
0
27

Period det.
LLE*
LLE*
Pixels num
Pixels num

Feature
GPCI*
GEI
Ellipse Fit
H&V Proj.

Classier
7NN
7NN
PCA+SVM
PCA+SVM

Correct rate
92.33%
92.00%
90.00%[6]
90.3%[19]

Table III
T EST RESULTS BY DIFFERENT GENDER CLASSIFICATION
ALGORITHMS ON IRIP G AIT DATABASE

Table I
S UMMARY OF THE PROPOSED LLE BASED PERIOD EXTRACTION
ALGORITHM

VI. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK

K value of KNN
GEI
GPCI*

K=7
92.00%
92.33%

K=9
90.00%
92.33%

K=11
90.67%
91.00%

Table II
P ERFORMANCE OF THE PROPOSED GENDER CLASSIFICATION
ALGORITHM

in the Table VI. We can see the periods extracted from 30

to 150 degree are almost right, but in 0 degree and 180
degree, its accuracy is not so high. However, people cant
point out the period in the silhouette of walking in front
side or back side.
We apply the proposed representation GPCI on IRIP
Gait Database for gender Classication. In the classication process, we divided the sequences into two sets,
training sequences (gallery) and test sequences (probe).
There are 60 subjects in the database, including 32 men
and 28 women. As we mainly consider the 90 degree angle
of view, the walking sequence captured by C5 was used in
this experiment. We use Leave-one-out method to partition
gallery data and probe data. In the experiment, One GPCI
of each person (5 sequence / person) has been chosen as
probe data in turn and the remaining GPCIs (59 persons *
5 sequences / person) were used as gallery data. In the end,
the KNN classication based on Euclidian Distance was
employed to judge the gender of the test subject. Because
there are 5 sequences for each person, the top 5 nearest
neighbors may be the same person. So, the values of K
we tested are more than 5.
The GEI and GPCI are both computed on the same
period sequences extracted by our proposed LLE based
period extraction automatically. Proper period can improve
classication accuracy. We can see the correct classication rate is so encouraging in Table VI. On the same
database, D.Zhang [6] et al achieved 90% gender classication rate with 7 ellipses tted feature and PCA+SVM
classier. Furthermore, another approach [19] which used
horizontal and vertical projection feature of silhouettes and
PCA+SVM classier, had 90.3% gender classication rate.
We test our proposed GPCI with KNN classier in this
paper to improve this classication rate to 92.33%. The
performances of these algorithms on IRIP Gait Database
are shown in TableVI.

In this paper, we propose a gait period extraction approach and a new representation for gender classication.
LLE and PCA were employed as the main method in the
process. We used Gait Principal Component Image (GPCI)
as the gait appearance feature for gender classication.
The experimental results show that GPCI is capable of
capturing the spatio-temporal information, and the proposed method has high classication accuracy.
In the future work, we will try to contrive other gait
representation for gender classication. And other dimension reduction techniques and classiers will be employed
to improve classication accuracy.
VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported by the opening funding of the
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and
Systems(Beihang University).
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