A Lightweight Attention-Based CNN Model for Efficient Gait Recognition with Wearable IMU Sensors

Wearable sensors-based gait recognition is an effective method to recognize people’s identity by recognizing the unique way they walk. Recently, the adoption of deep learning networks for gait recognition has achieved significant performance improvement and become a new promising trend. However, most of the existing studies mainly focused on improving the gait recognition accuracy while ignored model complexity, which make them unsuitable for wearable devices. In this study, we proposed a lightweight attention-based Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) model for wearable gait recognition. Specifically, a four-layer lightweight CNN was first employed to extract gait features. Then, a novel attention module based on contextual encoding information and depthwise separable convolution was designed and integrated into the lightweight CNN to enhance the extracted gait features and simplify the complexity of the model. Finally, the Softmax classifier was used for classification to realize gait recognition. We conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed model on whuGait and OU-ISIR datasets. The effect of the proposed attention mechanisms, different data segmentation methods, and different attention mechanisms on gait recognition performance were studied and analyzed. The comparison results with the existing similar researches in terms of recognition accuracy and number of model parameters shown that our proposed model not only achieved a higher recognition performance but also reduced the model complexity by 86.5% on average.