Recognizing people by gait has a unique advantage over other biometrics: it has potential for use at a distance when other biometrics might be at too low a resolution, or might be obscured. In this paper, an improved method for gait recognition is proposed. The proposed work introduces a nonlinear machine learning method, kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA), to extract gait features from silhouettes for individual recognition. Binarized silhouette of a motion object is first represented by four 1-D signals which are the basic image features called the distance vectors. The distance vectors are differences between the bounding box and silhouette, and extracted using four projections to silhouette. Classic linear feature extraction approaches, such as PCA, LDA, and FLDA, only take the 2-order statistics among gait patterns into account, and are not sensitive to higher order statistics of data. Therefore, KPCA is used to extract higher order relations among gait patterns for future recognition. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is employed as a preprocessing step to achieve translation invariant on the gait patterns accumulated from silhouette sequences which are extracted from the subjects walk in different speed and/or different time. The experiments are carried out on the CMU and the USF gait databases and presented based on the different training gait cycles. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is comparatively illustrated to take into consideration the published gait recognition approaches.