A monocular marker-free gait measurement system

This paper presents a new, user-friendly, portable motion capture and gait analysis system for capturing and analyzing human gait, designed as a telemedicine tool to monitor remotely the progress of patients through treatment. The system requires minimal user input and simple single-camera filming (which can be acquired from a basic webcam) making it very accessible to nontechnical, nonclinical personnel. This system can allow gait studies to acquire a much larger data set and allow trained gait analysts to focus their skills on the interpretation phase of gait analysis. The design uses a novel motion capture method derived from spatiotemporal segmentation and model-based tracking. Testing is performed on four monocular, sagittal-view, sample gait videos. Results of modeling, tracking, and analysis stages are presented with standard gait graphs and parameters compared to manually acquired data.