The best reference for Cooper's work on Markov Random Fields and the recognition of occluded shapes is:
Cooper, P.A. "Parallel Structure Recognition with Uncertainty" Proc. ICCV, Osaka, Japan , December 1990
The best reference for Goddard's work on Dynamic Connectionist Models and the recognition of human gaits is:
Goddard, N. H. "Human Activity Recognition" in Motion-Based Recognition, Shah, M. and Jain, R. (Eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.
There will be a related lecture by John Hummel in the Cognitive Science Colloquium on November 7 at 11am in 2515 Tolman Hall. A good reference for this work is:
Hummel, J. E., & Biederman, I. (1992). Dynamic binding in a neural network for shape recognition. Psychological Review, 99, 480-517.