Video-based analysis of Gait pathologies
Gait analysis has emerged as one of the most important medical field recently due to its wide range of applications. Marker-based systems are the most favoured methods of human motion assessment and gait analysis, however, these systems require specific equipment and expertise, and are cumbersome, costly and difficult to use. Many re- cent computer-vision-based approaches have been developed to reduce the cost of the expensive motion capture systems while ensuring high accuracy result. In this thesis, we introduce our new low-cost gait analysis system that is composed of two low-cost monocular cameras (camcorders) placed on the left and right sides of a treadmill. Each 2D left or right human skeleton model is reconstructed from each view based on dy- namic color segmentation, the gait analysis is then performed on these two models. The validation with one state-of-the-art vision-based motion capture system (using the Mi- crosoft Kinect v.1) and one ground-truth (with markers) was done to demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our system. The average error in human skeleton model estimation compared to ground-truth between our method vs. Kinect are very promis- ing: the joints angles of upper legs (6.29◦ vs. 9.68◦), lower legs (7.68◦ vs. 11.47◦), feet (6.14◦ vs. 13.63◦), stride lengths (6.14cm vs. 13.63cm) were better and more stable than those from the Kinect, while the system could maintain a reasonably close accu- racy to the Kinect for upper arms (7.29◦ vs. 6.12◦), lower arms (8.33◦ vs. 8.04◦), and torso (8.69◦ vs. 6.47◦). Based on the skeleton model obtained by each method, we per- formed a symmetry study on various joints (elbow, knee and ankle) using each method on two different subjects to see which method can distinguish more efficiently the sym- metry/asymmetry characteristic of gaits. In our test, our system reported a maximum knee angle of 8.97◦ and 13.86◦ for normal and asymmetric walks respectively, while the Kinect gave 10.58◦ and 11.94◦. Compared to the ground-truth, 7.64◦ and 14.34◦, our system showed more accuracy and discriminative power between the two cases.
Pose estimation Video-based gait analysis