The largest inertial sensor-based gait database and performance evaluation of gait-based personal authentication

•We present the world largest inertial sensor-based database to the community.•Based on the database, females have a better recognition performance than males.•People have the best recognition performance at their twenties.•An accelerometer has a better recognition performance than a gyroscope.

This paper presents the largest inertial sensor-based gait database in the world, which is made open to the research community, and its application to a statistically reliable performance evaluation for gait-based personal authentication. We construct several datasets for both accelerometer and gyroscope of three inertial measurement units and a smartphone around the waist of a subject, which include at most 744 subjects (389 males and 355 females) with ages ranging from 2 to 78 years. The database has several advantages: a large number of subjects with a balanced gender ratio, variations of sensor types, sensor locations, and ground slope conditions. Therefore, we can reliably analyze the dependence of gait authentication performance on a number of factors such as gender, age group, sensor type, ground condition, and sensor location. The results with the latest existing authentication methods provide several insights for these factors.