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Chinese 'Gait Recognition' Tech IDs People By How They Walk; Police Have Started Using It on Streets of Beijing and Shanghai (apnews.com)
Chinese authorities have begun deploying a new surveillance tool: "gait recognition" software that uses people's body shapes and how they walk to identify them, even when their faces are hidden from cameras. From a report: Already used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, "gait recognition" is part of a push across China to develop artificial-intelligence and data-driven surveillance that is raising concern about how far the technology will go. Huang Yongzhen, the CEO of Watrix, said that its system can identify people from up to 50 meters (165 feet) away, even with their back turned or face covered. This can fill a gap in facial recognition, which needs close-up, high-resolution images of a person's face to work. "You don't need people's cooperation for us to be able to recognize their identity," Huang said in an interview in his Beijing office. "Gait analysis can't be fooled by simply limping, walking with splayed feet or hunching over, because we're analyzing all the features of an entire body."
The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) is an XML-based information exchange framework used by the US government to grease the sharing of information between departments. It was started in the Bush administration in 2005. I first noticed it around 2008 and it contained fields to define PersonGait at that time (version 2 I think).
They have deleted some of these fields since then. I suspect they did so because it gave out too much information about what they are doing though it is also possible the new administration rolled back the push into some of these areas.
The rules for getting data components added to the model include a requirement that the data components must already be in use by at least 2 different departments. So, in 2008, at least 2 departments of the government were using a person's gait as an identifying characteristic.
I have included a list of the fields in the "PersonAugmentationType" data type for the V2.0 version of the spec from a decade ago below. Many are interesting including: body odor, ear shape, finger geometry, gait, hand geometry, keystroke dynamics, lip movement, urine, vein pattern, etc.
The NIEM is publicly available and published on Github. I highly recommend downloading one of the older versions before they sanitized it, like V2.0 or so, and spending some time looking at the spreadsheets that describe it. The insight to be gained in what the government has reason to store about us is extensive.