Human gait is the repeated pattern of dynamic motions exhibited by the different body joints [1]. Recurrent stances of heel strike, standing, and heel off are exhibited during walking [2]. Unique characteristics extracted from the recurrent locomotion of the body joints are exploited in the biometrics for the identification of a person [1]. The general acceptability of obtaining gait from a distance, low cost, and variety of data acquisition sensors, and in general, a high accuracy of identification of a person from a distance make gait recognition one of the most popular behavioral biometrics [3]. Gait recognition has numerous applications, such as person identification [4,5], human activity recognition [6], gender recognition [7], emotion recognition from human posture [8], search and rescue operations [9,10], access control [11], medical diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation [12,13].

Supervised machine learning models trained with distinctive features extracted from the biometric trait pave the way to automate the simulation of the biometric identification [14,15]. Gait-based person identification with the help of traditional machine learning models have been studied considerably over the past decade [16]. The accelerated pace of the development of the powerful deep learning methods has opened up unprecedented opportunities to leverage them in many domains. Domains of computer vision, computational intelligence, cognitive architectures, human–computer interaction, trustworthy decision making, defense, robotics, and biometrics benefit from the development of powerful deep learning architectures that are lightweight and versatile, and they provide high performance without overfitting. Performance of the image classification [17], face recognition [18], facial expression recognition [19], person verification [20], and others [21,22] are enhanced, exploiting the power of deep learning. However, such approaches have been in their infancy in the biometric domain, and they have been concerned with Kinect-based person identification based on human gait [16].

One of the first successful works that introduced deep learning neural network architecture for Kinect-based gait recognition appeared in [23]. Aside from the deep learning approach, there have been many successful approaches devised over the past decade that facilitate the successful recognition of humans based on Kinect-based gait biometrics [24,25,26]. These approaches had a number of deficiencies. Handcrafted classifying features were proposed for Kinect-based gait recognition in [5,23,25,26]. The extraction of handcrafted features requires specialization in the target domain and the selection of uncorrelated distinctive features is difficult to perform. In addition, traditional machine learning methods for gait recognition relied on the computationally expensive pre-processing steps and expensive feature selection methods. A deep convolutional neural network provides new opportunities to overcome the above challenges and thus to improve recognition performance. However, when a deep convolutional network is considered for feature extraction and recognition purposes simultaneously, degradation problems may arise because the error rates in training are increased after the convergence [27,28].

Microsoft Kinect produces a color-based depth video frame with the human skeleton from the 2D color image. The proposed architecture KinectGaitNet addresses the aforementioned challenges while overcoming degradation problems typical for deep convolutional neural networks. The main contributions of the proposed method can be outlined as follows. First, a unique 3D input representation of joint coordinates during the gait cycle is proposed. Thus, without extracting handcrafted features, the proposed input representation serves as the input of the CNN architecture for hierarchical feature extraction. Second, a new convolutional neural network architecture called KinectGaitNet based on residual learning is designed. Two types of residual learning blocks are introduced in such a way that the degradation problem is mitigated and the number of trainable parameters does not increase. Third, the KinectGaitNet architecture is being trained on variable length gait cycles, without the need of resampling to a fixed length. This is accomplished by the introduction of the global average pooling layer before the decision layer. Finally, the Adam optimization method [29] is applied to optimize the weights of the KinectGaitNet for training the model faster and providing robustness to the model, which works with the adaptive learning rate. Two publicly available benchmark datasets, the UPCV gait dataset [7] and Kinect Gait Biometry dataset [24], are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.

The Microsoft Kinect sensor is well suited for indoor and outdoor environments because of the markerless motion analysis, easy accessibility of sensor data, and cost-effectiveness. The Kinect sensor can generate 3D skeleton data at the speed of 30 frames per second [30]. Moreover, the extraction of the body joints tracked by the Kinect sensor shows the accuracy and precision of less than 2 mm [31]. Clark et al. [32] validated the applicability of the Kinect sensor for gait analysis by conducting experiments on the kinectmatic, postural, and spatiotemporal analysis.

The work on model-based gait recognition using the Kinect sensor was started by Preis et al. [4], who introduced eleven handcrafted static and two dynamic features with Rule-based, Decision Tree (DTree), and Naïve Bayes classifiers. In the same year, temporal features of eighteen angles calculated from the selected body joints were extracted to investigate the gait attributes using the K-means clustering method [33]. Later, Joint Relative Distance (JRD) and Joint Relative Angle (JRA) features were proposed in [25], and the rank-level fusion technique was applied to fuse those features. Andersson and Araujo [24] applied Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) architecture; however, the performance of the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were better than that of MLP architecture. Yang et al. [26] extracted relative distance features from selective body joints and determined their average and standard deviation over the frames of a gait cycle. Recently, by performing feature extraction from selected body joints, Sun et al. [5] extracted static and dynamic features to train the traditional KNN classifier.

From the aforementioned related works, it is evident that prior research relied on handcrafted features to train the traditional classifiers. However, traditional classifiers can not learn hierarchical feature representation from the samples of the input data. In addition, uncorrelated handcrafted feature extraction demands target-specific knowledge. Handcrafted feature extraction also requires a feature selection step to remove features that cause a negative contribution to the performance due to correlation with other features. A first attempt at integrating deep learning with Kinect-based gait recognition was made in 2019. The researchers utilized three hidden layers to design deep neural network [34]. Their method lacked the solution of managing different length gait sequences and thus required an additional step of the majority voting method after determining the prediction labels of each of the frames of a gait sequence. Furthermore, frame-by-frame prediction causes prediction errors because of the similarity of a particular frame with another person’s gait pattern. Another work extracted joint relative distance and joint relative angle features and determined the average and standard deviation of the handcrafted features over 30 frames [35]. Accumulated features were trained using a convolutional neural network and optimized by the Stochastic Gradient Descent optimizer. After the re-implementation of this method, the recognition performance was below 15% on both the UPCV and Kinect Gait Biometry datasets. There are several reasons for low accuracy. First, since the CNN architecture is trained with the handcrafted features, the uniform kernel can not be used to extract hierarchical features using the CNN architecture. Second, the model suffers from overfitting. Third, the gait cycle is not considered for handcrafted features. As a result, this method is not included in the experimental section.

The proposed methodology presents several novel contributions. The transformation approach is introduced to transform the coordinates of the body joints into a 2D matrix based on the gait cycle. Then, 2D matrices are merged to create a 3D matrix using x, y, and z coordinates. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed to extract a low-level to high-level distinctive hierarchical feature map and learn a person’s identification from the samples of 3D matrices. Since the input of the CNN architecture is the 3D matrix generated from the body joints, handcrafted features are avoided, and hierarchical features are extracted directly from the body joints. The proposed CNN architecture is designed in such a way that the CNN architecture can handle the variable length of the gait cycles without resampling of the 3D matrix to a fixed dimension. The residual learning [27] blocks are introduced to design the architecture of the CNN model to mitigate the degradation problem with the reduced model parameters. The Adam optimizer is used to minimize the loss of the objective function.

There are two phases for the Kinect-based gait recognition. During the registration phase, features are extracted by the proposed convolutional neural network using residual learning from the skeleton-based gait sequences. Extracted features in different layers of the CNN model are trained and optimized during the registration phase. Optimized features are used during the identification phase. During the identification phase, unknown Kinect skeleton-based gait sequences are used. The trained CNN model is applied to the prediction of a person’s identification. The flowchart of the proposed system is shown in Figure 1.