A review of simulation methods for human movement dynamics with emphasis on gait

Multibody System Dynamics - Human gait analysis is a complex problem in biomechanics because of highly nonlinear human motion equations, muscle dynamics, and foot-ground contact. Despite a large...     

The effects of different carrying methods on human gait parameters

Lifting and carrying are essential tasks that affect human balance and gait. Choosing a certain gait pattern could help reduce the risk of falling. This study investigates the differences in human gait parameters and lateral bending of the trunk when carrying a 5-gallon water bottle, compared to that of normal walking. Several gait parameters were considered, including the cadence, stride width, step length, total double support duration, walking speed, toe angle, and single support duration. A laboratory experiment was conducted considering 23 healthy males, 18–30 years in age, performing several carrying scenarios, with and without the use of two assistive devices (a bottle lifting handgrip handle and back and lumbar support). The ProtoKinetics Zeno™ Walkway Gait Analysis System and the ProtoKinetics Movement Analysis Software were used to measure the spatiotemporal gait parameters. In addition, the lumbar spine's lateral bending was measured using Kinovea software. The results showed that the assistive carrying devices helped achieve less deviation in the walking pattern while carrying, compared to that of normal walking, and reduced the lateral bending of the trunk, resulting in greater balance while carrying. This, in turn, helps reduce the chance of falling and the stress in the joints and muscles, thereby increasing stability. In conclusion, carrying two 5-gallon water bottles using a handgrip handle assistive device was the most preferred carrying method.     

Brain-computer interfaces for human gait restoration

In this review article,we present more than a decade of our work on the development of brain-computer interface(BCI)systems for the restoration of walking follo...     

Analyzing human gait and posture by combining feature selection and kernel methods

This paper evaluates a set of computational algorithms for the automatic estimation of human postures and gait properties from signals provided by an inertial body sensor. The use of a single sensor device imposes limitations for the automatic estimation of relevant properties, like step length and gait velocity, as well as for the detection of standard postures like sitting or standing. Moreover, the exact location and orientation of the sensor are also a common restriction that is relaxed in this study.Based on accelerations provided by a sensor, known as the ‘9×2’, three approaches are presented extracting kinematic information from the user motion and posture. First, a two-phases procedure implementing feature extraction and support vector machine based classification for daily living activity monitoring is presented. Second, support vector regression is applied on heuristically extracted features for the automatic computation of spatiotemporal properties during gait. Finally, sensor information is interpreted as an observation of a particular trajectory of the human gait dynamical system, from which a reconstruction space is obtained, and then transformed using standard principal components analysis, finally support vector regression is used for prediction.Daily living activities are detected and spatiotemporal parameters of human gait are estimated using methods sharing a common structure based on feature extraction and kernel methods. The approaches presented are susceptible to be used for medical purposes.     

Hierarchical pose estimation for human gait analysis

Articulated structures like the human body have many degrees of freedom. This makes an evaluation of the configuration's likelihood very challenging. In this work we propose new linked hierarchical graphical models which are able to efficiently evaluate likelihoods of articulated structures by sharing visual primitives. Instead of evaluating all configurations of the human body separately we take advantage of the fact that different configurations of the human body share body parts, and body parts, in turn, share visual primitives. A hierarchical Markov random field is used to integrate the sharing of visual primitives in a probabilistic framework. We propose a scalable hierarchical representation of the human body and show that this representation is especially well suited for human gait analysis from a frontal camera perspective. Furthermore, the results of the evaluation on a gait dataset show that sharing primitives substantially accelerates the evaluation and that our hierarchical probabilistic framework is a robust method for scalable detection of the human body.     

Silhouette analysis-based gait recognition for human identification

Human identification at a distance has recently gained growing interest from computer vision researchers. Gait recognition aims essentially to address this problem by identifying people based on the way they walk. In this paper, a simple but efficient gait recognition algorithm using spatial-temporal silhouette analysis is proposed. For each image sequence, a background subtraction algorithm and a simple correspondence procedure are first used to segment and track the moving silhouettes of a walking figure. Then, eigenspace transformation based on principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to time-varying distance signals derived from a sequence of silhouette images to reduce the dimensionality of the input feature space. Supervised pattern classification techniques are finally performed in the lower-dimensional eigenspace for recognition. This method implicitly captures the structural and transitional characteristics of gait. Extensive experimental results on outdoor image sequences demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has an encouraging recognition performance with relatively low computational cost.     

基于脸部和步态特征融合的身份识别

提出了一种将脸部和步态特征相结合,应用于智能监控系统进行远距离视频流中身份识别的新方法.该方法首先分别采用隐马尔可夫模型(HMM)和Fisherfaces方法进行步态和脸部的识别,之后将这两个分类器得到的结果进行匹配级的融合.对从不同方向采集的31个人的视频序列进行分析实验,结果表明将脸部和步态特征相结合进行身份识别具有很好的鲁棒性,其识别性能也优于只采用脸部或步态单一特征的识别方法.     

Subband entropy-based features for clothing invariant human gait recognition

This paper presents a wavelet-based feature extraction method for human gait recognition. The selection of features with most discriminative information is the key to improve recognition performance. The frequency domain representation of the gait image is obtained by using fast Fourier transforms. Next, a discrete wavelet transform is applied to the obtained spectrum. With single-level wavelet decomposition, four coefficients are generated. The sum of the entropy of these four wavelet coefficients is computed yielding the wavelet Entropy Image (wEnI) which is used here as the potential feature for human gait recognition. A template matching-based approach is used as the classification. The performance of the proposed wEnI feature is evaluated using whole-based and part-based methods. The experimental results show that the wEnI feature performs better compared to state-of-the-art gait features in common use.     

Applying adversarial auto-encoder for estimating human walking gait abnormality index

Pattern Analysis and Applications - This paper proposes an approach that estimates a human walking gait abnormality index using an adversarial auto-encoder (AAE), i.e., a combination of...     

Solution methods and computational investigations for the Linear Bottleneck Assignment Problem

The Linear Bottleneck Assignment ProblemLBAP is analyzed from a computational point of view. Beside a brief review of known algorithms new methods are developed using only sparse subgraphs for their computation. The practical behaviour of both types of algorithms is investigated. The most promising algorithm consists of computing a maximum cardinality matching with all edge costs smaller than a previously determined bound and augmenting this matching to an assignment. The methods on sparse subgraphs are useful in the case of memory restrictions and are superior if the subgraph selection can be improved by some previously generated structure. Other treated questions are how to select a suitable subgraph for the new methods, how to deal with non regular data and what connections to asymptotic results for theLBAP can be detected. Supported by the SFB F003 ‘Optimierung und Kontrolle’, Bereich Diskrete Optimierung.     

Reconstruction of occluded ROI in multi-person gait based on numerical methods

Occlusion is an important factor for analysis of human gait recognition in real-time scenarios. In multi-person gait (MPG) or dynamic occlusion, gait recog     

仿生机器人运动步态控制:强化学习方法综述

仿生机器人是一类典型的多关节非线性欠驱动系统，其步态控制是一个非常具有挑战性的问题。对于该问题，传统的控制和规划方法需要针对具体的运动任务进行专门设计，需要耗费大量时间和精力，而且所设计出来的控制器往往没有通用性。基于数据驱动的强化学习方法能对不同的任务进行自主学习，且对不同的机器人和运动任务具有良好的通用性。因此，近年来这种基于强化学习的方法在仿生机器人运动步态控制方面获得了不少应用。针对这方面的研究，本文从问题形式化、策略表示方法和策略学习方法3个方面对现有的研究情况进行了分析和总结，总结了强化学习应用于仿生机器人步态控制中尚待解决的问题，并指出了后续的发展方向。     

Feature fusion of side face and gait for video-based human identification

Video-based human recognition at a distance remains a challenging problem for the fusion of multimodal biometrics. As compared to the approach based on match score level fusion, in this paper, we present a new approach that utilizes and integrates information from side face and gait at the feature level. The features of face and gait are obtained separately using principal component analysis (PCA) from enhanced side face image (ESFI) and gait energy image (GEI), respectively. Multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) is employed on the concatenated features of face and gait to obtain discriminating synthetic features. This process allows the generation of better features and reduces the curse of dimensionality. The proposed scheme is tested using two comparative data sets to show the effect of changing clothes and face changing over time. Moreover, the proposed feature level fusion is compared with the match score level fusion and another feature level fusion scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that the synthetic features, encoding both side face and gait information, carry more discriminating power than the individual biometrics features, and the proposed feature level fusion scheme outperforms the match score level and another feature level fusion scheme. The performance of different fusion schemes is also shown as cumulative match characteristic (CMC) curves. They further demonstrate the strength of the proposed fusion scheme.     

Integrating face and gait for human recognition at a distance in video.

This paper introduces a new video-based recognition method to recognize noncooperating individuals at a distance in video who expose side views to the camera. Information from two biometrics sources, side face and gait, is utilized and integrated for recognition. For side face, an enhanced side-face image (ESFI), a higher resolution image compared with the image directly obtained from a single video frame, is constructed, which integrates face information from multiple video frames. For gait, the gait energy image (GEI), a spatio-temporal compact representation of gait in video, is used to characterize human-walking properties. The features of face and gait are obtained separately using the principal component analysis and multiple discriminant analysis combined method from ESFI and GEI, respectively. They are then integrated at the match score level by using different fusion strategies. The approach is tested on a database of video sequences, corresponding to 45 people, which are collected over seven months. The different fusion methods are compared and analyzed. The experimental results show that: 1) the idea of constructing ESFI from multiple frames is promising for human recognition in video, and better face features are extracted from ESFI compared to those from the original side-face images (OSFIs); 2) the synchronization of face and gait is not necessary for face template ESFI and gait template GEI; the synthetic match scores combine information from them; and 3) an integrated information from side face and gait is effective for human recognition in video.     

Gait flow image: A silhouette-based gait representation for human identification

In this paper, we propose a novel gait representation—gait flow image (GFI) for use in gait recognition. This representation will further improve recognition rates. The basis of GFI is the binary silhouette sequence. GFI is generated by using an optical flow field without constructing any model. The performance of the proposed representation was evaluated and compared with the other representations, such as gait energy image (GEI), experimentally on the USF data set. The USF data set is a public data set in which the image sequences were captured outdoors. The experimental results show that the proposed representation is efficient for human identification. The average recognition rate of GFI is better than that of the other representations in direct matching and dimensional reduction approaches. In the direct matching approach, GFI achieved an average identification rate 42.83%, which is better than GEI by 3.75%. In the dimensional reduction approach, GFI achieved an average identification rate 43.08%, which is better than GEI by 1.5%. The experimental result showed that GFI is stronger in resisting the difference of the carrying condition compared with other gait representations.     

A Bayesian framework for extracting human gait using strong prior knowledge

Extracting full-body motion of walking people from monocular video sequences in complex, real-world environments is an important and difficult problem, going beyond simple tracking, whose satisfactory solution demands an appropriate balance between use of prior knowledge and learning from data. We propose a consistent Bayesian framework for introducing strong prior knowledge into a system for extracting human gait. In this work, the strong prior is built from a simple articulated model having both time-invariant (static) and time-variant (dynamic) parameters. The model is easily modified to cater to situations such as walkers wearing clothing that obscures the limbs. The statistics of the parameters are learned from high-quality (indoor laboratory) data and the Bayesian framework then allows us to "bootstrap" to accurate gait extraction on the noisy images typical of cluttered, outdoor scenes. To achieve automatic fitting, we use a hidden Markov model to detect the phases of images in a walking cycle. We demonstrate our approach on silhouettes extracted from fronto-parallel ("sideways on") sequences of walkers under both high-quality indoor and noisy outdoor conditions. As well as high-quality data with synthetic noise and occlusions added, we also test walkers with rucksacks, skirts, and trench coats. Results are quantified in terms of chamfer distance and average pixel error between automatically extracted body points and corresponding hand-labeled points. No one part of the system is novel in itself, but the overall framework makes it feasible to extract gait from very much poorer quality image sequences than hitherto. This is confirmed by comparing person identification by gait using our method and a well-established baseline recognition algorithm