Gait-based Human identification using acoustic sensor and deep neural network

Abstract This paper proposes a simple, fast and low-cost gait-based human identification system jointly employing an acoustic sensor system and a deep neural network (DNN) based algorithm to process acoustic data for human identification. The acoustic sensor system is employed to detect and acquire individuals’ gait signatures. Compared with the conventional radar based and video/image based human gait identification technologies, our acoustic sensor system is low-cost and feasible in some special cases, such as in private rooms/hotels or in the night time. We perform identification using a DNN which consists of an auto-encoder and a feed-forward neural network. The experimental results demonstrate that the integrated system of acoustic sensor and DNN considerably improves the system’s performance, which achieves an excellent accuracy rate of 97% for human identification. Aside from the high accuracy of the gait-based human identification, the novel system we developed is also capable of identifying human actions (walk, jog, run, jump, etc.) and the human number which has not been addressed in the literature, thereby significantly enhancing the wide adaptability of our identification system in various applications. Additionally, to better enhance the performance of the proposed human identification method, a large feature set, variable-length frame size and variable-dimension feature vectors are exploited in our identification system. The presented work provides prospects in developing high-performance identification system for large-scale security applications via a simple and efficient technique.