HorGait: Advancing Gait Recognition With Efficient High-Order Spatial Interactions in LiDAR Point Clouds

Gait recognition is a remote biometric technology that utilizes the dynamic characteristics of human movement to identify individuals even under various extreme lighting conditions. Due to the limitation in spatial perception capability inherent in 2D gait representations, LiDAR can directly capture 3D gait features and represent them as point clouds, reducing environmental and lighting interference in recognition while significantly advancing privacy protection. For complex 3D representations, shallow networks fail to achieve accurate recognition, making vision Transformers the foremost prevalent method. However, the prevalence of dumb patches has limited the widespread use of Transformer architecture in gait recognition. This paper proposes a method named HorGait, which utilizes a hybrid model with a Transformer architecture for gait recognition on the planar projection of 3D point clouds from LiDAR. Specifically, it employs a hybrid model structure called LHM Block to achieve input adaptation, long-range, and high-order spatial interaction of the Transformer architecture. Additionally, it uses large convolutional kernel CNNs to segment the input representation, replacing attention windows to reduce dumb patches. Extensive experiments demonstrated that HorGait achieved a Rank-1 accuracy of 82.54% on the SUSTech1K dataset, surpassing the state-of-the-art Transformer architecture method by 8.33%. This confirms the hybrid model’s ability to execute the complete Transformer process and excel in point cloud planar projection. The outstanding performance of HorGait offers new insights for the future application of the Transformer architecture in gait recognition.