Walk This WayWalk This Way

Go ahead and wear a mask to your bank heist--a lot of good it'll do you if a new federally funded research project pays off. Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute are working on ways to identify people by the way they walk.

It's referred to as gait recognition and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency thinks it could one day aid law enforcement. It might also help doctors diagnose some medical problems.

Jon Geisheimer, a research engineer at Georgia Tech, says the goal is to identify an individual from up to 500 feet away at any time of day and in any weather. "Our first goal was to decide if gait was even worth working at, and we've determined that it is," Geisheimer says.

The school is studying two approaches to spotting struts: One employs radar; the other uses computer vision. How far off are the days when your swagger is stored on a database somewhere? Geisheimer is rightly cautious. "The technology is just 2 years old," he says. Electronic facial recognition has been in development for a decade, and commercial products are only just dribbling out.