Gait recognition, a rapidly advancing vision technology for person identification from a distance, has made significant strides in indoor settings. However, evidence suggests that existing methods often yield unsatisfactory results when applied to newly released real-world gait datasets. Furthermore, conclusions drawn from indoor gait datasets may not easily generalize to outdoor ones. Therefore, the primary goal of this work is to present a comprehensive benchmark study aimed at improving practicality rather than solely focusing on enhancing performance. To this end, we first develop OpenGait, a flexible and efficient gait recognition platform. Using OpenGait as a foundation, we conduct in-depth ablation experiments to revisit recent developments in gait recognition. Surprisingly, we detect some imperfect parts of certain prior methods thereby resulting in several critical yet undiscovered insights. Inspired by these findings, we develop three structurally simple yet empirically powerful and practically robust baseline models, i.e., DeepGaitV2, SkeletonGait, and SkeletonGait++, respectively representing the appearance-based, model-based, and multi-modal methodology for gait pattern description. Beyond achieving SoTA performances, more importantly, our careful exploration sheds new light on the modeling experience of deep gait models, the representational capacity of typical gait modalities, and so on. We hope this work can inspire further research and application of gait recognition towards better practicality. The code is available at https://github.com/ShiqiYu/OpenGait.
