DPAGait: Dynamic Pose-Knowledge-Aware Network for Robust Gait Recognition in the Wild

Gait biometrics aims at identity recognition by appearance or pose features captured during unconstrained human walking. Existing methods predominantly rely on binary silhouette images, inherently characterized by low information entropy, and fail to fully utilize the dynamic information in gait sequences, limiting their ability to handle cross-time variations effectively. Consequently, these methods encounter significant challenges in the wild. They are susceptible to variations in clothing, carried objects, and viewpoints, as well as dynamic environmental conditions, all of which lead to substantial degradation in recognition accuracy and robustness. To overcome these challenges, we propose a pose-knowledge-aware approach specifically designed for robust gait recognition in the wild. First, we propose a novel Dynamic Pose-Parsing enhanced Silhouette gait representation paradigm that substantially enhances the information entropy and effectively captures fine-grained behavioral cues by integrating pose-parsing cues with traditional silhouettes. Subsequently, we develop a dual-branch Dynamic Pose-Knowledge-Aware Gait network. The framework consists of two complementary branches: (1) a 2D dynamic pose-aware branch that extracts pose-enhanced features from our proposed DPPS representations, and (2) a 3D Skinned Multi-Person Linear branch that leverages the 3D SMPL model to capture rich and comprehensive 3D dynamic pose information. Finally, the features are integrated to facilitate accurate and robust gait recognition. Extensive experiments on four challenging in-the-wild gait datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed DPPS representation. The complete framework is further evaluated on SUSTech1K, CCPG, and Gait3D, where SMPL information is available or can be consistently estimated, achieving competitive performance under diverse real-world conditions.