An Efficient Automatic Gait Anomaly Detection Method Based on Semisupervised Clustering

The aim of this work is to develop a common automatic computer method to distinguish human individuals with abnormal gait patterns from those with normal gait patterns. As long as the silhouette gait images of the subjects are obtainable, the proposed method is capable of providing online anomaly gait detection result without additional work on analyzing the gait features of the target subjects before ahead. Moreover, the proposed method does not need any parameter settings by users and can start producing detection results under the work by only collecting a very small number of gait samples, even though none of those gait samples are abnormal. Therefore, the proposed method can provide fast and simple deployment for various anomaly gait detection application scenarios. The proposed method is composed of two main modules: (1) feature extraction from gait images and (2) anomaly detection via binary classification. In the first module, a new representation of the most frequently involved area of the silhouette gait images called full gait energy image (F-GEI) is proposed. Furthermore, based on the F-GEI, a novel and simple method characterizing individual walking properties is developed to extract gait features from individual subjects. In the second module, based on the very limited prior knowledge on the target dataset, a semisupervised clustering algorithm is proposed to perform the binary classification for detecting the gait anomaly of each subject. The performance of the proposed gait anomaly detection method was evaluated on the human gaits dataset in comparison with three state-of-the-art methods. The experiment results show that the proposed method is an effective and efficient gait anomaly detection method in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency.