The surveillance robot has been an important component in the field of service robot industry. In the surveillance robot technology, one of the most important technology is to identify a person. In this paper, we propose a gait recognition method based on contourlet and fuzzy LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis) for surveillance robots. After decomposing a gait image into directional subband images by contourlet, features are obtained in each subband by the fuzzy LDA. The final gait recognition is performed by a fusion technique that effectively combines similarities calculated respectively in each local subband. To show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, various experiments are performed for CBNU and NLPR DB datasets. From these, we obtained better classification rates in comparison with the result produced by previous methods.