# Self-Supervised Gait Encoding with Locality-Aware Attention for Person Re-Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.09435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09435/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Deep Gait Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09546/) (2021)
- [TranSG: Transformer-Based Skeleton Graph Prototype Contrastive Learning with Structure-Trajectory Prompted Reconstruction for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06819/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Skeleton Meta-Prototype Contrastive Learning with Hard Skeleton Mining for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12917/) (2023)
- [SM-SGE: A Self-Supervised Multi-Scale Skeleton Graph Encoding Framework for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01903/) (2021)
- [Multi-Level Graph Encoding with Structural-Collaborative Relation Learning for Skeleton-Based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03069/) (2021)
- [SimMC: Simple Masked Contrastive Learning of Skeleton Representations for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09826/) (2022)
- [Reliable Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification via Modality-Aware Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14847/) (2025)
- [Skeleton Prototype Contrastive Learning with Multi-Level Graph Relation Modeling for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11814/) (2022)
- [Motif Guided Graph Transformer with Combinatorial Skeleton Prototype Learning for Skeleton-Based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09044/) (2024)
- [A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15296/) (2024)
- [Skeletons Speak Louder than Text: A Motion-Aware Pretraining Paradigm for Video-Based Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13150/) (2025)
- [Affinity Contrastive Learning for Skeleton-based Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16694/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gait-based person re-identification (Re-ID) is valuable for safety-critical applications, and using only 3D skeleton data to extract discriminative gait features for person Re-ID is an emerging open topic. Existing methods either adopt hand-crafted features or learn gait features by traditional supervised learning paradigms. Unlike previous methods, we for the first time propose a generic gait encoding approach that can utilize unlabeled skeleton data to learn gait representations in a self-supervised manner. Specifically, we first propose to introduce self-supervision by learning to reconstruct input skeleton sequences in reverse order, which facilitates learning richer high-level semantics and better gait representations. Second, inspired by the fact that motion's continuity endows temporally adjacent skeletons with higher correlations ("locality"), we propose a locality-aware attention mechanism that encourages learning larger attention weights for temporally adjacent skeletons when reconstructing current skeleton, so as to learn locality when encoding gait. Finally, we propose Attention-based Gait Encodings (AGEs), which are built using context vectors learned by locality-aware attention, as final gait representations. AGEs are directly utilized to realize effective person Re-ID. Our approach typically improves existing skeleton-based methods by 10-20% Rank-1 accuracy, and it achieves comparable or even superior performance to multi-modal methods with extra RGB or depth information. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Kali-Hac/SGE-LA.