Gait recognition has recently attracted increasing attention, especially in vision-based human identification at a distance in visual surveillance. This paper proposes a simple but efficient gait recognition algorithm based on statistical shape analysis. For each gait sequence, a background subtraction procedure is used to segment spatial silhouettes of the walking figures from the background. Static pose changes of these silhouettes over time are represented as a sequence of associated complex configurations in a common coordinate, and are then analyzed using the Procrustes shape analysis method to obtain gait signature. The k-nearest neighbor classifier and the nearest exemplar classifier based on the full Procrustes distance measure are adopted for recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has an encouraging recognition performance.