GaitAsset: In Defense of Regarding Gait as a Set

Saihui Hou, Chenye Wang, Aoqi Li, Jilong Wang, Liang Wang, Yongzhen Huang

Abstract: In the field of gait recognition, regarding gait as a set has emerged as a seminal approach, notably eliminating the dependence on template-based input. Although set-based methods offer notable advantages, such as insensitivity to frame order permutations and robustness to varying frame counts, their performance has consistently lagged behind that of sequence-based methods in subsequent studies. In this work, we advocate for treating gait as an unordered set and argue that the lack of set context aggregation in frame-level feature extraction is the primary limitation hindering the full potential of set-based gait recognition. To substantiate this claim, we develop a gait-oriented self-attention module and introduce a Gating Mechanism that facilitates set context awareness for each silhouette while preserving the permutation-invariant property. Specifically, the context aggregation operates on diverse bins of feature maps, interleaving fine-grained shape and motion details in an almost parameter-free manner. The Gating Mechanism is employed to ensure that frame-level features are not overwhelmed by the aggregated context. Furthermore, the sampling strategy is carefully enhanced to better support set context modeling. Our research demonstrates that set-based gait recognition can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on in-the-wild benchmarks (77.6% on Gait3D and 81.1% on GREW) while retaining its inherent advantages.

External IDs:doi:10.1109/tifs.2025.3630892