A new paradigm of human gait analysis with Kinect

Abstract

Analysis of human gait helps to find an intrinsic gait signature through which ubiquitous human identification and medical disorder problems can be investigated in a broad spectrum. The gait biometric provides an unobtrusive feature by which video gait data can be captured at a larger distance without prior awareness of the subject. In this paper, a new technique has been addressed to study the human gait analysis with Kinect Xbox device. It ensures us to minimize the segmentation errors with automated background subtraction technique. The closely similar human skeleton model can be generated from background subtracted gait images, altered by covariate conditions, such as change in walking speed and variations in clothing type. The gait signatures are captured from joint angle trajectories of left hip, left knee, right hip and right knee of subject's skeleton model. The experimental verification on Kinect gait data has been compared with our in-house development of sensor based biometric suit, Intelligent Gait Oscillation Detector (IGOD). An endeavor has been taken to investigate whether this sensor based biometric suit can be altered with a Kinect device for the proliferation of robust gait identification system. The Fisher discriminant analysis has been applied on training gait signature to look into the discriminatory power of feature vector. The Naïve Bayesian classifier demonstrates an encouraging classification result with estimation of errors on limited dataset captured by Kinect sensor.