The invention provides a gait recognition method and device and belongs to the technical field of mode recognition. The gait recognition method comprises the steps of training sample video images to obtain a gait codebook, obtaining foreground image sequences of a person to be recognized during walking, extracting oriented gradient histogram characteristics of the foreground image sequences, generating sparse coding characteristics according to the gait codebook generated through training and the oriented gradient histogram characteristics and obtaining identity of the person to be recognized according to the sparse coding characteristics. When the person to be recognized is blocked by parts of video frames or appears in videos only for a short period of time, the gait recognition method and device can accurately recognize the identity of the person to be recognized.