Multimodal feature fusion for CNN-based gait recognition: an empirical comparison

People identification in video based on the way they walk (i.e. gait) is a relevant task in computer vision using a non-invasive approach. Standard and current approaches typically derive gait signatures from sequences of binary energy maps of subjects extracted from images, but this process introduces a large amount of non-stationary noise, thus, conditioning their efficacy. In contrast, in this paper we focus on the raw pixels, or simple functions derived from them, letting advanced learning techniques to extract relevant features. Therefore, we present a comparative study of different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures on three low-level features (i.e. gray pixels, optical flow channels and depth maps) on two widely-adopted and challenging datasets: TUM-GAID and CASIA-B. In addition, we perform a comparative study between different early and late fusion methods used to combine the information obtained from each kind of low-level features. Our experimental results suggest that (i) the use of hand-crafted energy maps (e.g. GEI) is not necessary, since equal or better results can be achieved from the raw pixels; (ii) the combination of multiple modalities (i.e. gray pixels, optical flow and depth maps) from different CNNs allows to obtain state-of-the-art results on the gait task with an image resolution several times smaller than the previously reported results; and, (iii) the selection of the architecture is a critical point that can make the difference between state-of-the-art results or poor results.