First published: 04th January 2011
An article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports rumours of a Chinese research team working on a novel biometric: dynamic weight distribution on the feet. A touch-sensitive pad collects not just static weight distribution information but sophisticated dynamics of the subject's gait. An "accuracy" of 98% is claimed, though the test details are not mentioned.
According to the SCMP, the US Embassy in Beijing told the State Department in Washington about the research and their suspicions that it was funded by the PLA in February 2010. The information was later published by WikiLeaks.
But the SCMP quotes one of the lead researchers on the project, Zhou Xu, as saying the funding is from the Ministry for State Security who intend to use it for identifying and tracking Chinese citizens. If the "accuracy" of 98% indicates a false positive rate of 2%, then the device will need a lot of improvement before it can be used to track individuals. For example, if a person of interest (terrorist/dissident/suspect - delete as appropriate) is being tracked in a small city of 1 million people, then there will be 20,000 other people with an indistinguishable walking pattern. There is also the cost of relaying every footpath, or at least, all major junctions, with detection pads.
Previous research into gait recognition has focussed on analysis of video, where one low-resolution camera can scan to cover a large area.