“Well you can tell by the way I use my walk,”

For some time I’ve been saying that security is going to be a huge market for machine vision technology. Much of the talk has been about face and iris recognition, but some smart guys in India have another idea: gait recognition.

You need to read this posting on the optics.org blog to get the full details, but the gist of it is that we can, in theory anyway, all be identified by our distinctive walk. I think we’ve all had occasions when we’ve recognized someone from afar by the way they moved, so this idea may have some value. It also has the advantage of being non-intrusive, unlike iris recognition which requires the target to voluntarily submit to being scanned.

The downside though is going to be enrolling people in the scheme. You will need to know who they are as they walk past a camera so as to record name and gait together, but there are situations where that might be both possible and useful – to control access to secure buildings for example. Imagine what a great help it would be if the door recognized you as you approached, opening to let you in without you needing to break stride. Now that would be useful!

And, to give credit where it’s due, the source of my headline is the Bee Gees song, “Staying Alive”, popularized in the movie “Saturday Night Fever”.