Hybrid Dynamical Models of Human Motion for the Recognition of Human Gaits

We propose a hybrid dynamical model of human motion and develop a classification algorithm for the purpose of analysis and recognition. We assume that some temporal statistics are extracted from the images, and use them to infer a dynamical model that explicitly represents ground contact events. Such events correspond to “switches” between symmetric sets of hidden parameters in an auto-regressive model. We propose novel algorithms to estimate switches and model parameters, and develop a distance between such models that explicitly factors out exogenous inputs that are not unique to an individual or his/her gait. We show that such a distance is more discriminative than the distance between simple linear systems for the task of gait recognition.