WM–STGCN: A Novel Spatiotemporal Modeling Method for Parkinsonian Gait Recognition

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes gait abnormalities. Early and accurate recognition of PD gait is crucial for effective treatment. Recently, deep learning techniques have shown promising results in PD gait analysis. However, most existing methods focus on severity estimation and frozen gait detection, while the recognition of Parkinsonian gait and normal gait from the forward video has not been reported. In this paper, we propose a novel spatiotemporal modeling method for PD gait recognition, named WM–STGCN, which utilizes a Weighted adjacency matrix with virtual connection and Multi-scale temporal convolution in a Spatiotemporal Graph Convolution Network. The weighted matrix enables different intensities to be assigned to different spatial features, including virtual connections, while the multi-scale temporal convolution helps to effectively capture the temporal features at different scales. Moreover, we employ various approaches to augment skeleton data. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieved the best accuracy of 87.1% and an F1 score of 92.85%, outperforming Long short-term memory (LSTM), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), Decision tree, AdaBoost, and ST–GCN models. Our proposed WM–STGCN provides an effective spatiotemporal modeling method for PD gait recognition that outperforms existing methods. It has the potential for clinical application in PD diagnosis and treatment.