GaitRGA: Gait Recognition Based on Relation-Aware Global Attention

Gait recognition, a long-range biometric technique based on walking posture, the fact that they do not require the cooperation of the subject and are non-invasive has made them highly sought after in recent years.Although existing methods have achieved impressive results in laboratory environments, the recognition performance is still deficient in real-world applications, especially when confronted with complex and dynamic scenarios. The major challenges in gait recognition include changes in viewing angle, occlusion, clothing changes, and significant differences in gait characteristics under different walking conditions. To slove these issues, we propose a gait recognition method based on relational-aware global attention. Specifically, we introduce a Relational-aware Global Attention (RGA) module, which captures global structural information within gait sequences to enable more precise attention learning. Unlike traditional gait recognition methods that rely solely on local convolutions, we stack pairwise associations between each feature position in the gait silhouette and all other feature positions, along with the features themselves, using a shallow convolutional model to learn attention. This approach is particularly effective in gait recognition due to the physical constraints on human walking postures, allowing the structural information embedded in the global relationships to aid in inferring the semantics and focus areas of various body parts, thereby improving the differentiation of gait features across individuals. Our experimental results on multiple datasets (Grew, Gait3D, SUSTech1k) demonstrate that GaitRGA achieves significant performance improvements, especially in real-world scenarios.