Abstract: Two simple and effective gait recognition methods-model-based and model-free are discribed. The model-based method are sorts to a skeletal model of the body. The background of the gait sequence is in itialized automatically. The body silhouette is segmented from the image and is converted into a skeletal model afterwards. And then we extract body's static and dynamic parameters such as height, the position of the joint and the angle of the body etc. The model-free method calculates optical flow among images and gait features are extracted from optical flow. The utility of the proposed method is illustrated using indoor video sequences in our experiments and a good identification performance is gained.