An attempt to detect impairment by silhouette-based gait feature

INTRODUCTION and AIM We can usually guess if a person has some impairments, such as a person whose leg is immobilized in a plastic cast, an elder person who cannot bend his/her knees, and a cataract patient, just by seeing them walking. If we can realize a system that can automatically estimate the impairment by observing them by a camera, it would be useful; e.g., in a commercial facility such a system would be helpful for staffs to find and assist a person with impairment immediately. There are several studies that investigate a difference of normal and abnormal walking, but they cannot be applied for our purpose since they use accurate 3-D pose obtained by expensive motion capture systems. Some other studies [1] use cameras but they use theatrical actions which are quite different from natural impaired walking. In our work, we apply a vision-based gait feature extraction technique that has been applied to personal authentication task for discrimination of normal and impaired walking.