Human gait feature extraction based-on silhouette and center of mass

Abstract

When someone walks, there is a repetitive movement or coordinated cycle that forms a gait. Gait is different, unique and difficult to imitate. This characteristic makes gait one of the biometrics to find out one's identity. Gait analysis is needed in the development of biometric technology, such as in the field of security surveillance and the health sector to monitor gait abnormalities. The center of mass is the unique point of every object that has a role in the study of humans walking. Each person has a different center of mass. In this research, through a series of processes in image processing such as video acquisition, segmentation, silhouette formation, and feature extraction, the center of mass of the human body can be identified using a webcam with the resolution of 640 x 480 pixels and the frame rate of 30 frames/second. The results obtained from this research were gait frames of 510 frames from 17 pedestrian videos. Segmentation process using background subtraction separates the pedestrian object image from the background. Silhouette gait was produced from a series of image enhancement processes to eliminate noise that interferes the image quality. Based on the silhouette, feature extraction provides the center of mass to distinguish each individual's gait. The sequence of center of mass can be further processed for characterizing human gait cycle for various purposes.