Gait has received much attention from researchers in the vision field due to its utility in walker identification. One of the key issues in gait recognition is how to extract discriminative shape features from 2D human silhouette images. This paper deals with the problem of gait-based walker recognition using statistical shape features. First, we normalize walkers’ silhouettes (to facilitate gait feature comparison) into a square form and use the orthogonal projections in the positive and negative diagonal directions to draw personal signatures contained in gait patterns. Then principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are applied to reduce the dimensionality of original gait features and to improve the topological structure in the feature space. Finally, this paper accomplishes the recognition of unknown gait features based on the nearest neighbor rule, with the discussion of the effect of distance metrics and scales on discriminating performance. E...