  Gait recognition from motion capture data, as a pattern classification
discipline, can be improved by the use of machine learning. This paper
contributes to the state-of-the-art with a statistical approach for extracting
robust gait features directly from raw data by a modification of Linear
Discriminant Analysis with Maximum Margin Criterion. Experiments on the CMU
MoCap database show that the suggested method outperforms thirteen relevant
methods based on geometric features and a method to learn the features by a
combination of Principal Component Analysis and Linear Discriminant Analysis.
The methods are evaluated in terms of the distribution of biometric templates
in respective feature spaces expressed in a number of class separability
coefficients and classification metrics. Results also indicate a high
portability of learned features, that means, we can learn what aspects of walk
people generally differ in and extract those as general gait features.
Recognizing people without needing group-specific features is convenient as
particular people might not always provide annotated learning data. As a
contribution to reproducible research, our evaluation framework and database
have been made publicly available. This research makes motion capture
technology directly applicable for human recognition.
