Today we are witnessing an increasingly widespread use of cameras in our lives for video surveillance, robot vision, and mobile phones. This has led to a renewed interest in computer vision in general and an on-going boom in human activity recognition in particular. Although not particularly fancy per se, human gait is inarguably the most common and frequent action. Early on this decade there has been a passing interest in human gait recognition, but it soon declined before we came up with a systematic analysis and understanding of walking motion. This paper presents a set of DBN-based models for the analysis of human gait in sequence of increasing complexity and modeling power. The discussion centers around HMM-based statistical methods capable of modeling the variability and incompleteness of input video signals. Finally a novel idea of extending the discrete state Markov chain with a continuous density function is proposed in order to better characterize the gait direction. The proposed modeling framework allows us to recognize pedestrian up to 91.67% and to elegantly decode out two independent gait components of direction and posture through a sequence of experiments.