Enhancing part-based gait recognition via ensemble learning and feature fusion

Gait, a behavior-based biometric feature, has gained increasing popularity in human identification, particularly in surveillance systems, due to its ability to function without physical contact or explicit consent. Traditional silhouette-based methods have demonstrated that different body parts exhibit distinct movement patterns during walking, thereby enhancing recognition accuracy. In this study, we propose an improved part-based gait recognition approach by leveraging ensemble learning on local body regions. The Gait Energy Image (GEI) is segmented into five horizontal parts, and ensemble learning is applied to the convolutional neural network (CNN) responsible for their processing. A separate MetaModel is trained for each body part to integrate the part-based features obtained from ensemble learning and synthesize the most discriminative ones. Additionally, a part-removal process is introduced to mitigate the effects of appearance-based variations by analyzing absolute differences between images with and without variations. The aggregated most distinctive features contribute to robust recognition. We evaluate our proposed approach on the CASIA-B, CASIA-C, and Outdoor-Gait datasets, and experimental results indicate that ensemble learning significantly enhances part-based gait recognition performance under various appearance variations, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods. The datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/busrakckugurlu/Enhancing-Part-based-Gait-Recognition-via-Ensemble-Learning-and-Feature-Fusion/tree/main.