Pedestrian Attribute Editing for Gait Recognition and Anonymization

As a kind of biometrics, the gait information of pedestrians has attracted widespread attention from both industry and academia since it can be acquired from long distances without the cooperation of targets. In recent literature, this line of research has brought exciting chances along with alarming challenges: On the positive side, gait recognition used for security applications such as suspect retrieval and safety checks is becoming more and more promising. On the negative side, the misuse of gait information may lead to privacy concerns, as lawbreakers can track subjects of interest using gait characteristics even under face-masked and clothes-changed scenarios. To handle this double-edged sword, we propose a gait attribute editing framework termed GaitEditor. It can perform various degrees of attribute edits on real gait sequences while maintaining the visual authenticity, respectively used for gait data augmentation and de-identification, thereby adaptively enhancing or degrading gait recognition performance according to users' intentions. Experimentally, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation under both gait recognition and anonymization protocols on three widely used gait benchmarks. Numerous results illustrate that the adaptable utilization of GaitEditor efficiently improves gait recognition performance and generates vivid visualizations with de-identification to protect human privacy. To the best of our knowledge, GaitEditor is the first framework capable of editing multiple gait attributes while simultaneously benefiting gait recognition and gait anonymization. The source code of GaitEditor will be available at https://github.com/ShiqiYu/OpenGait.