Review of gait recognition systems: approaches and challenges

Gait recognition (GR) has emerged as a significant biometric identification technique, leveraging an individual's walking pattern for various applications such as surveillance, forensic analysis, and person identification. Despite its non-intrusive nature, GR systems face challenges due to their sensitivity to pose variations, limiting functionality in real-world scenarios where people exhibit diverse walking styles and body orientations. This review paper aims to comprehensively discuss GR systems, focusing on approaches and challenges in designing accurate and robust systems capable of handling bodily variations. GR's prominence spans across domains including surveillance, security, healthcare, and human-computer interaction, positioning it as a versatile biometric modality complementary to the traditional methods like fingerprint and face recognition. The review offers an in-depth analysis of GR systems, detailing silhouette-based, model-based, and deep-learning approaches. Silhouette-based methods capture gait information by analyzing the outline and locomotion of a person’s silhouette, while model-based approaches utilize skeletal models to describe gait patterns. The paper elucidates the challenges and limitations of GR systems, encompassing factors such as walking conditions, clothing, viewpoint, and environmental influences. Additionally, it explores potential future directions in GR research, highlighting the technology’s ongoing evolution and integration into diverse applications. As a valuable resource, this review serves researchers, practitioners, and policymakers by providing insights into the current state of GR systems and avenues for further research and development. It underscores the importance of addressing challenges to enhance GR’s accuracy and robustness, ensuring its continued relevance in biometric identification across various domains.