2.1. Gait trajectories generation

In this work, the gait data were recorded by two Microsoft Azure Kinect DK sensors placed in front and on the side of the subjects. Kinect DK is a convenient body tracking toolkit to capture RBG image, depth information, and human skeleton coordinates all at once, reducing the need for sophisticated model extraction processes. By the body tracking function, we can extract a real-time data stream of the body joints, represented by 25 joint coordinates in a 3D space. We selected 20 joints with relatively large ranges of motion to represent the gait movement. Then, we concatenated the coordinates of each joint to form a continuous trajectory by the motion across time. Finally, to eliminate the impact of the distance variations between people and cameras, we normalized the coordinates using the distance between a subject’s hip and neck.

2.2. Learning separated representations

Let $x \in \mathcal{X}$ be a gait trajectory sequence and $\mathcal{X}$ be the collection of all the trajectories in the training data. In stage 1, $E_{id}$ denotes the identity encoder and $E_{em}$ denotes the emotion encoder. To learn separated identity and emotion representations, we employ two classifiers $C_{id}$ and $C_{em}$ with adversarial learning constraints on the feature encoders. These constraints ensure that changes in one factor cannot be predicted from another factor to realize independence between them. Based on the adversarial training concept, $E_{em}$ maximizes the retention of emotional information and discards identity information by minimizing the negative log probability to differentiate the identities. On the other hand, the classifier $C_{em}$ is trained adversarially to induce the encoder $E_{id}$ to extract only identity-related features. We thus apply the loss:

(1) \begin{align} \mathcal{L}^{em}_{cls}&=\sum -\log P_{C_{em}}\left (c_{em}^{x} \mid{E_{em}}\left (x\right )\right )\nonumber \\[5pt] &\quad +\sum \log P_{C_{em}}\left (c_{id}^{x} \mid{E_{id}}\left (x\right )\right ) \end{align}

(2) \begin{align} \mathcal{L}^{id}_{cls}&=\sum -\log P_{C_{id}}\left (c_{id}^{x} \mid{E_{id}}\left (x\right )\right )\nonumber \\[5pt] & \quad +\sum \log P_{C_{id}}\left (c_{em}^{x} \mid{E_{em}}\left (x\right )\right ) \end{align}

To perform random sampling at test time, we restrict the emotion feature representation to a conditionally independent Gaussian distribution, by introducing KL divergence loss to match the posterior distribution $p(z_{em}|x)$ to the prior $N(0, I)$ . We thus apply the loss:

(3) \begin{equation} \mathcal{L}_{KL}=E\left [KL\left (z_{em}|x \| N(0,1)\right )\right ] \end{equation}

where ${KL}(p\|q)$ represents the Kullback–Leibler Divergence score and quantifies the difference between two given probability distributions $p$ and $q$ .

The generator $\mathrm{G}$ is trained to generate $x^{\prime }$ which is a reconstruction of $x$ from the concatenation of emotion representation $z_{em}$ and identity representation $z_{id}$ , given the original emotion label $c^x$ and target emotion label $c^{x^{\prime }}$ :

(4) \begin{equation} x^{\prime }=G(E_{id}(x), E_{em}(x)) \end{equation}

By using both original and target label as conditional information, this restriction encourages all the converted data to be close to real data. The mean absolute error is minimized in training the generator. So the reconstruction loss is given:

(5) \begin{equation} \mathcal{L}_{rec}=\sum \left \|x^{\prime }-x\right \|_{1} \end{equation}

The full objective in stage 1 is deployed by the following equation:

(6) \begin{equation} \mathcal{L}_{1}^{total}=\lambda _{1}^{rec}\mathcal{L}_{rec}+\lambda _{1}^{KL}\mathcal{L}_{KL}+\lambda _{1}^{em}\mathcal{L}_{cls}^{em}+\lambda _{1}^{id}\mathcal{L}_{cls}^{id} \end{equation}

which integrates the above losses and the hyperparameters $\lambda _{1}$ s control the importance of each term. The encoders and the discriminators are trained alternatively.

2.3. Cycle-consistent GANs

Here, to learn an emotional gait conversion with paired emotional gait samples using the separated representation of identity in stage 1, we propose a cycle consistency technique to exploit the further features for cyclic reconstruction. Let $x, y \in \mathcal{X}$ be the two sampled gait trajectory sequences (as illustrated in Fig. 3). $c_{em}^{x}$ and $c_{id}^{x}$ denote the emotion label and identity label of sequence $x$ , respectively, and $c_{em}^{y}$ and $c_{id}^{y}$ denote the labels of sequence $y$ . We encode them into vector $\{v_{id}^x\}$ and $\{v_{id}^y, v_{em}^y\}$ by the pretrained encoders $E_{em}$ and $E_{id}$ . We then perform the generation process by reassembling the extracted identity vector $v_{id}^x$ and the emotion vector $v_{em}^y$ into a combined representation of a synthetic sample $z$ :

Figure 3.

The framework of the proposed adversarial learning network for emotional gait dataset augmentation.

(7) \begin{equation} z=G\left (v_{id}^{x}, v_{em}^{y}\right ) \end{equation}

We further encode $z$ into $\{v_{em}^z, v_{id}^z\}$ . Then, a cycle consistency loss $\mathcal{L}^{id}_{cycl}$ for $v_{id}^x$ , $v_{id}^y$ , and $v_{id}^z$ , the same structure as triplet loss [Reference Schroff, Kalenichenko and Philbin36], is designed to enforce identity preservation:

(8) \begin{equation} \mathcal{L}^{id}_{cycl}=\sum \left [ \left \| v_{id}^z - v_{id}^x\right \|^2_2 - \left \| v_{id}^z - v_{id}^y\right \|^2_2 + \alpha \right ]_+ \end{equation}

where $\alpha$ is the value of the margin in two terms. Another cycle consistency loss $\mathcal{L}^{em}_{cycl}$ between $v_{em}^y$ and $v_{em}^z$ is used to enforce emotion preservation:

(9) \begin{equation} L^{em}_{cycl}=\sum \left \| v_{em}^z - v_{em}^y\right \|^2_2 \end{equation}

We employ the reconstruction loss $\mathcal{L}_{rec}$ only when $c_{id}^{x} = c_{id}^{y}$ :

(10) \begin{equation} \mathcal{L}_{rec}=\left \{\begin{array}{l@{\quad}l}\sum \left \|z-x\right \|_{1}, & c_{id}^{x} = c_{id}^{y} \\[5pt] 0, & Otherwise \end{array}\right. \end{equation}

We also impose domain adversarial losses by a unified MTL discriminator $D_{MTL}$ to discriminate between natural gaits and generated gaits in each conversion process and distinguish the generated data in both the emotion and identity domains. This adversarial MTL loss can be expressed as:

\begin{align*} \mathcal{L}_{MTL} &=\sum (\log (D_{MTL}(x))+ \log (D_{MTL}(y)))\\[5pt] & \quad + \sum \log (1-D_{MTL}(z))\\[5pt] & \quad -\sum \log P_{D_{MTL}}\left (c_{em}^{y} \mid{E_{em}}\left (z\right )\right )\\[5pt] & \quad - \sum \log P_{D_{MTL}}\left (c_{id}^{x} \mid{E_{id}}\left (z\right )\right ) \end{align*}

Here, we also restrict the emotion attribute representation to a conditionally independent Gaussian distribution, by introducing KL divergence loss $L_{\mathrm{KL}}$ . The overall loss is a weighted sum of the above losses:

(11) \begin{align} \mathcal{L}_{2}^{total} &= \lambda _{2}^{rec}\mathcal{L}_{rec}+\lambda _{2}^{MTL}\mathcal{L}_{MTL}+\lambda _{2}^{id}\mathcal{L}_{cycl}^{id}\nonumber \\[5pt] &\quad +\lambda _{2}^{emo}\mathcal{L}_{cycl}^{em} +\lambda _{2}^{KL}\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{KL}} \end{align}

where hyperparameters $\lambda _{2}$ s are the regularization weights.

2.4. Gait-based recognition with data augmentation

According to its own specific defects of the training datasets, we design two strategies for data augmentation. For the small-scale dataset with complete labels, data augmentation is implemented by disentangling and composing the emotion and identity feature vector from different people, as illustrated in Fig. 4. In this strategy, we synthesize each target samples with three alternative emotion vectors and the specific identity vectors to generate the same amount of each emotional samples. For the large-scale dataset with restricted labels, data augmentation is implemented by random emotion sampling, which is shown in Fig. 5. With the random emotion vector, we can generate different variants of emotion-labeled samples to increase the amount and diversity of the original dataset.

Figure 4.

Data augmentation by emotional conversion strategy. Data augmentation is implemented by disentangling and composing the emotion and identity feature vector from different people to improve the scale and variability of the original dataset.

Figure 5.

Data augmentation by random emotion sampling. Our model could generate specific emotion vectors from the common emotion space by adapting the Gaussian stochastic sampling. With the random emotion vector, we can generate different variants of emotion-labeled synthetic samples to derive an augmentation for the target restricted dataset.

After applying data augmentation strategies, we can easily train a multitask discriminator on the augmented and original dataset as our recognition model and then assess the quality of these synthetic samples through the discriminator. As illustrated in Fig. 3(c), the discriminator $D_{MTL}$ attempts to discriminate between natural gaits and generated gaits in each conversion process and distinguish the generated data in both of the emotion and identity domains.

3.1. Data preparation

To evaluate our approach and measure the quality of the synthetic dataset, we conducted several experiments for verification tasks on the public UPCV gait (K1&K2) dataset and multi-class labeled EmoGait3d dataset.

Figure 6.

Images and skeleton joints of three different emotion from the EmoGait3d dataset.

The UPCV gait dataset contains 60 subjects in total from two subsets: UPCV gait K1 [Reference Kastaniotis, Theodorakopoulos, Theoharatos, Economou and Fotopoulos37] and UPCV gait K2 [Reference Kastaniotis, Theodorakopoulos, Economou and Fotopoulos38]. The former contains five gait sequences for 30 participants captured using the Microsoft Kinect V1 sensor, and the latter captured by the Kinect V2 sensor contains a total of 300 sequences from 30 walkers. Each person walks in a straight line at a normal speed. The sensor maintains a fixed viewpoint in the walking direction at a frame rate of 30 fps. While, samples in UPCV gait are only annotated with identity labels and hardly perceived for their emotion categories through walking characteristics. Here, we regard the dataset as a large-scale restricted dataset and annotate all the samples with the emotion label of a neutral state. Because each gait sequence has a varied temporal duration, we extract 32-frame subsequences with a three-frame interval from each original sequence. With the pose estimation algorithm, we estimate the joint coordinates from each continuous 32-frame image sequence to obtain a $32\times 20\times 3$ trajectories vector as a gait sample. In the UPCV gait dataset, we can get a set of 15,053 samples as the original dataset. By implementing the data augmentation of random emotion sampling, each neutral sample can be transferred into positive, neutral, and negative samples. We finally obtained a set of $15053\times 3$ synthetic samples as the augmented dataset of UPCV gait.

The EmoGait3d dataset is built to validate the effectiveness of the MTL structure by jointly training on multiple gait-related tasks. It consists of 1484 real-world gait videos annotated with identity labels and emotion labels. We recruited 27 volunteers (10 female and 17 male, aged 18–35 years) from campuses and took RGB and depth videos with two Microsoft Azure Kinect DK sensors. Each participant was asked to walk multiple times under three emotions (shown in Fig. 6). Participants’ emotions were elicited by watching emotional movie clips, which were selected prior to the experiments based on their questionnaires. After completing the data collection, subjects were required to rate their emotional state during walking with a value on a scale from 1 to 10. When the emotion evoked by the film was consistent with the subject’s self-assessment emotion, and the rating score was higher than 8, the video could be labeled as the elicited emotion. Otherwise, it would be marked as an invalid video. With the proposed data augmentation method, we generated $1484\times 3$ synthetic emotional samples (shown in Fig. 7), by separating identity and emotion representations from the original EmoGait3d dataset for each of the three emotion categories.

Figure 7.

Synthetic emotional gait trajectories. A real gait sample from the EmoGai3d database is represented on the left, and the synthetic target emotional gaits are shown on the right.

3.2. Implementation details

The network architecture is illustrated in Fig. 3 with details listed in Table I. The encoders take 32-dimensional gait skeleton sequences as input and learn disentangled identity and emotion representations. In the emotion encoder, we apply instance normalization (IN) to removes the identity information while preserving the emotion information. The identity encoder provides the global identity information $\mu _i$ and $\sigma _i$ to the generator by adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) layer before activation. $\mu _e$ and $\sigma _e$ denote the channel-wise mean and standard variation of the emotion feature vector $e$ . The formula for a layer is given as follows:

(12) \begin{equation} AdaIN(e,i)=\sigma _i\left(\frac{e-\mu _e}{\sigma _e}\right)+\mu _i \end{equation}

The generator and encoders are implemented with recurrent layers and 1d convolutional layers to capture temporal dependencies and spatial patterns, respectively. Then, the temporal and spatial features are combined to represent a more discriminative embedding vector to feed the dense layers.

Table I.

Network architecture. C-K indicates convolution layer with kernel size K. IN is instance normalization. ReLU indicates ReLU activation and FC indicates fully connected layer.

The experiments are conducted on a system with two GTX TITAN XP GPUs. We first train the encoders to learn separated identification and emotion representations from 32-dimensional gait skeletal sequences. Then, the separated features are then combined to generate the synthetic emotional sample by dense layers. We use the Adam optimizer with a learning rate of 0.001. The batch size is set at 128. To reduce overfitting, we use the dropout approach with a dropout rate of 0.5. The discriminator and generator are updated with a 1:5 iteration frequency. We selected the parameters by using the early stopping criterion. If the validation error does not improve before the training epoch reaches the set value, the training procedure will be terminated earlier. We first pretrained the identity and emotion classifiers with $\mathcal{L}^{emo}_{cls}$ and $\mathcal{L}^{id}_{cls}$ in Eq. (1) and (2) for 10,000 mini-batches. Then we train the models in stage 1 and stage 2 successively for 30,000 mini-batches and 20,000 mini-batches. Also inference speed is an important aspect to evaluate the model. The preprocessing for pose estimation takes most of the time. The network inference procedure is relatively faster, which takes about 0.17 ms for each frame. Our model has low complexity and need to be optimized for real-world applications.

3.3. Objective evaluation

We evaluate the quality of the synthetic samples by comparing the recognition performance of the original and augmented EmoGait3d using the same setting of MTL classifiers. As shown in Table II, noticeable performance improvements of 2.1% and 6.8% can be observed by augmenting the original dataset. The experimental results show that samples generated by our model carry discriminative information that contributes to consistently higher performance for gait-based identity and emotion recognition. There is no emotion annotation in the original UPCV gait dataset, so we cannot get the emotion recognition results. While after data augmentation, the UPCV gait dataset is transferred to an emotional gait dataset with no significant reduction in the discriminative identity features.

Table II.

Results of the identity and emotion classification on the original and augmented dataset.

To highlight the effectiveness of our model, we also trained respective MTL classifiers for identity and emotion recognition using augmented data from CVAE, CGAN, CVAE-GAN, CycleGAN, StarGAN, and MUNIT and compared their performance, as shown in Table III. All the settings of baseline generative data augmentation approaches and classifiers are the same as ours for a fair comparison. The performance of our model obtains the best results of them. In contrast to these generative models, our model employs the separated features, and cycle consistency loss clearly outperforms all the others, especially for the gait emotion recognition task, which is 1.3% better than the baseline model MUNIT in average recognition accuracy. We can also observe that the model’s performance without stage 1 or disentangle learning process significantly declines, which shows the prominent effect of the two-stage emotional gait conversion model intuitively.

Table III.

Comparison of different generative models. Accuracies are computed using the same MTL classifier. The best results are marked in bold.

Both CVAE and CGAN can generate synthetic data similar to the training data. For CVAE, the generated gait sample is relatively stable, but the curves tend to be straight lines to cheat the discriminator. For CGAN, the diversity of the generated sample is better, but the naturalness of the generated sample is poor. Since CVAE-GAN combines a variational autoencoder with GAN, the quality of the generated data is better than CVAE and CGAN. Without the cycle loss as Cycle-GAN, the CVAE-GAN model fails to capture the temporal details of gait trajectories. Due to the absence of a feature separating process, the performance of the synthetic sample generated by CycleGAN or StarGAN is also not ideal. MUNIT adopts a weaker form of cycle consistency constraint between the content and style spaces, the generated sample of which is deficient in temporal details.

3.4. Subjective evaluation and Discussion

We also performed subjective human evaluations for the synthetic gait. Twenty subjects were given pairs of converted samples in random order and asked which one they preferred in terms of two measures: the naturalness and the similarity in emotional characteristics of the converted gait trajectories. We computed the distance between 600 pairs of synthetic gait trajectories converted from 200 real samples. As shown in Fig. 8, we calculated average preference scores on these synthetic samples from source to target emotion. Higher values indicate higher quality of the synthetic sample after emotional conversion. The proposed model achieves the highest scores in terms of the naturalness and the similarity in emotional characteristics of the converted gait samples.

Figure 8.

Average preference scores on naturalness and similarity of synthetic samples of different generative models.

To evaluate the effect of our model, we further visualize the feature distribution of each emotion class from the original and enhanced EmoGait3d datasets. As shown in Fig. 9, we observe that almost all of the identity and emotion features for each type of synthetic sample are well generated, and the synthetic samples are well aligned with the authentic samples. It shows the effectiveness of learned features intuitively. The well-aligned data distributions are key in increasing the amount and diversity of the original EmoGait3d dataset to achieve improved accuracy for gait emotion recognition.

Figure 9.

Visualization of the feature space after Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for the original and augmented EmoGait3d dataset. Three shapes of dots represent three kinds of emotional feature vectors, and the different colors correspond to different identities.