In many of my conversations with investors, researchers, journalists and even fellow biometric technology developers, I have often been asked whether or not the human gait is identifiable and if there might be an algorithm that once generated can give us a transferable pattern that’s useful.
The short answer is Yes. The obvious comes from the simple experience that many of us have had, of recognizing a friend or family member at a distance, where all you see in their silhouette. The amount of academic research that backs this up is immense. R&D bodies around the world are conducting gait pattern recognition research under the name of HID, or Human ID at a Distance and much is being published.
The University of Southampton and Georgia Tech have entire labs (many with post doctorates and others helping out) dedicated to this field of study. Other professionals are conducting research at Notre Dame and University of South Florida, under the heading of Computer Science.
The point I’m trying to make is that an individual’s gait is recognizable, but so far the data is only coming from objective, camera based snapshots, where the body’s image is primarily turned into a silhouette, with a pre-designed algorithm being used to mark the identity. It’s the future of this science that is most interesting, but for the moment I’ll not go into our technology.
So again, gait is identifiable, but it runs into problems with all the variables like clothing, walking malfunctions and more. And the biggest problem of all is that “HID” is funded by those interested in the surreptitious use of gait recognition. How about all of the reasons that we’d voluntarily give others our data? So long as we know just how much of it is given up and that we can disable the access?
At Plantiga, we are reviewing and internalizing the existing research in the design of our own gait biometric system. The foundation we depend on is consistently working with ongoing data generated from within our internally structured footwear.
Gait is an ultimate biometric because even when standing still, it can constantly be captured. One can’t quite walk around the airport or government office with a fingerprint scanner attached to their thumb, or an iris checker suctioned to their face. Gait, if you can capture it properly, could be the ultimate biometric in that it would be mobile (as in on the person) and persistent (as in always generating data).
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security, biometrics, identity, Gait analysis, Technology
