Human skeleton data augmentation for person identification over deep neural network

With the advancement in pose estimation techniques, skeleton-based person identification has recently received considerable attention in many applications. In this study, a skeleton-based person identification method using a deep neural network (DNN) is investigated. In this method, anthropometric features extracted from the human skeleton sequence are used as the input to the DNN. However, training the DNN with insufficient training datasets makes the network unstable and may lead to overfitting during the training phase, causing significant performance degradation in the testing phase. To cope with a shortage in the dataset, we investigate novel data augmentation for skeleton-based person identification by utilizing the bilateral symmetry of the human body. To achieve this, augmented vectors are generated by sharing the anthropometric features extracted from one side of the human body with the other and vice versa. Thereby, the total number of anthropometric feature vectors is increased by 256 times, which enables the DNN to be trained while avoiding overfitting. The simulation results demonstrate that the average accuracy of person identification is remarkably improved up to 100% based on the augmentation on public datasets.