Forensic gait analysis — Morphometric assessment from surveillance footage

Abstract

Following the technological rise of surveillance cameras and their subsequent proliferation in public places, the use of information gathered by such means for investigative and evaluative purposes sparked a large interest in the forensic community and within policing scenarios. In particular, it is suggested that analysis of the body, especially the assessment of gait characteristics, can provide useful information to aid the investigation. This paper discusses the influences upon gait to mitigate some of the limitations of surveillance footage, including those due to the varying anatomical differences between individuals. Furthermore, the differences between various techniques applied to assess gait are discussed, including biometric gait recognition, forensic gait analysis, tracking technology, and marker technology. This review article discusses the limitations of the current methods for assessment of gait; exposing gaps within the literature in regard to various influences impacting upon the gait cycle. Furthermore, it suggests a 'morphometric' technique to enhance the available procedures to potentially facilitate the development of standardised protocols with supporting statistics and database. This in turn will provide meaningful information to forensic investigation, intelligence-gathering processes, and potentially as an additional method of forensic evaluation of evidence.

Pre‐set estimation‐based in‐silico silhouette‐based methodology for improving the robustness to viewing direction difference for assisting forensic gait analysis

“…Whereas the previous study [23] required an on-site calibration procedure, the proposed method, which greatly expanded the condition setting of a previous study [22] to 900 conditions, made it possible to complete the process on a computer. However, silhouette-based forensic gait analysis has multiple problems including insufficient image quality and differences in clothing, and future work will be necessary to improve the accuracy of forensic gait analysis by effectively combining motion-based [2, 37,38], soft-biometric [39][40][41][42][43], and other morphological features [44] with our silhouette-based method.…”

Intelligent recognition system for viewpoint variations on gait and speech using CNN-CapsNet

“…Gait information image (GII) was computed by finding the pixel intensity values across all gait frames throughout the gait cycle. Finally, CASIA-B database was used to evaluate the clothing and carrying conditions using GII bipolar sigmoid feature (GII-BPSF) gait feature (Seckiner et al , 2019) and suggested the current surveillance system differs from analysis, comparison, evaluation and verification protocols and inference models to determine the variability of gait. Hence, this technique requires more work in the future for advanced automated surveillance systems.…”

Uniqueness of gait kinematics in a cohort study

“…Gait, a person’s walking pattern, is influenced by various individual features. For example, sex, somatotype, age, hand preference, habits, pathology, and ethnic or cultural background affect gait styles 1 . Physiological and behavioral characteristics, including gait, constitute the biometrics of a person.…”