Progressive Feature Learning for Realistic Cloth-Changing Gait Recognition

Gait recognition is instrumental in crime prevention and social security, for it can be conducted at a long distance without the cooperation of subjects. However, existing datasets and methods cannot deal with the most challenging problem in realistic gait recognition effectively: walking in different clothes (CL). In order to tackle this problem, we propose two benchmarks: CASIA-BN-RCC and OUMVLP-RCC, to simulate the cloth-changing condition in practice. The two benchmarks can force the algorithm to realize cross-view and cross-cloth with two sub-datasets. Furthermore, we propose a new framework that can be applied with off-the-shelf backbones to improve its performance in the Realistic Cloth-Changing problem with Progressive Feature Learning. Specifically, in our framework, we design Progressive Mapping and Progressive Uncertainty to extract the cross-view features and then extract cross-cloth features on the basis. In this way, the features from the cross-view sub-dataset can first dominate the feature space and relieve the uneven distribution caused by the adverse effect from the cross-cloth sub-dataset. The experiments on our benchmarks show that our framework can effectively improve the recognition performance in CL conditions. Our codes and datasets will be released after accepted.