GaitCycFormer: Leveraging Gait Cycles and Transformers for Gait Emotion Recognition

Gait Emotion Recognition (GER) is an emerging task within Human Emotion Recognition. Skeleton-based GER requires discriminative spatial and temporal features. However, current methods primarily focus on capturing spatial topology information but fail to effectively learn temporal features from long-distance frames. Moreover, these methods are mostly sensitive to the order of sampled sequences, resulting in significant accuracy drops when sequences are randomly sampled. In order to obtain a more robust and comprehensive spatial-temporal representation of gait, we introduce the Graph-Transformer architecture into GER for the first time, proposing a novel framework named GaitCycFormer. Specifically, we designed a Cycle Position Encoding (CPE) based on the gait cycle, which explicitly segments any gait sequence into more manageable periodic units, to enhance temporal feature modeling. Additionally, we incorporate a bi-level Transformer, consisting of an Intra-cycle Transformer and an Inter-cycle Transformer to capture local and global temporal information within each gait cycle and between gait cycles respectively. Experiments demonstrate that our GaitCycFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on popular datasets, and proves to be more reliable and robust.