Gait Analysis from Video: Camcorders vs. Kinect

Gait analysis is a domain of interest in clinical medical practice, both for neurological and non-neurological abnormal troubles. Marker-based systems are the most favored methods of human motion assessment and gait analysis, however, these systems require specific equipment and expertise and are cumbersome, costly and difficult to use. In this paper we compare two low-cost and marker-less systems that are: (1) A Kinect in front of a treadmill and (2) a set of two camcorders on the sides of the treadmill, used to reconstruct the skeleton of a subject during walk. We validated our method with ground truth data obtained with markers manually placed on the subject's body. Finally, we present an application for asymmetric gait recognition. Our results on different subjects showed that, compared to the Kinect, the two-camcorder approach was very efficient and provided accurate measurements for gait assessment.