I’ve just read about another brilliant idea, an idea to improve our security and make life even more difficult for crooks.

Intruders go to great lengths to hide their face.  Now though they might as well smile for the camera, as technology has been developed to identify a suspect by their gait.

With the development of CCTV and security systems with improved spatial awareness, ‘gait recognition measurement’, or to you and me ‘distinguishing someone by their walk’ is now a reality.  Tens of millions of people in the UK alone each have an identifiable gait.

Mammal, fish or fowl?

Initially I mused, being a species that shares many genes with other creatures, it’s hard to imagine how we achieve that level of individuality.  Thinking further though, it makes sense.  We don’t appear at all similar to other mammals, let alone fish or fowl.

The weird reality is that we’re not that different – two eyes, a mouth, a digestive system….  Apparently we share more similarities than there are differences between species.  Makes sense then that as the smallest of changes in the genetic code are needed to create enormous visual differences between species, with our unique genetic code we each have a unique way of walking.

Unless you happen to be a fish of course…..

Get that intruder’s gait for bait!

A new weapon in the arsenal of intruder detection systems, technology now exists to improve spatial awareness in CCTV and security systems.  It’s now possible, via a network of motion sensors and security cameras, to record a person's ‘gait signature’, and check to see where else that person has been.

In simple terms, each recognition point, or camera, records a gait signature when an individual passes by.  The signature separates the moving subject and a fixed background during the walking process, to form silhouettes.  Measurements of the rise and fall of head height between each silhouette are recorded.

Looking out for you 24/7, we can all benefit from CCTV

There are many benefits to be gained from this leap in visualisation tools.  Not least in identifying suspects based on their walk.  Standardisation of gait recognition could grow to become critically important for sustaining and developing security infrastructure, such as coded access to buildings and monitoring high security environments, airports for instance, ultimately protecting us all.

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