Human motion patterns from single camera cues for medical applications

Physical constraints that underly the formation of periodic motions can be effectively used to accurately reconstruct the periodic motion from even single camera views. As shown in our earlier work, this reduces to a problem of geometric inference. In this paper, we focus on periodic motions exhibited by humans, which are generally not perfectly periodic, and explore the suitability of the reconstruction techniques in these scenarios. We examine the degree of periodicity of human gait empirically, including the applicability of our motion model. Importantly, we illustrate the usefulness of these techniques by applying them to the task of clinical gait analysis. A computational tool to analyze periodic human motion can prove to be invaluable in medical applications either in terms of assessing deviations from normal patterns or evaluating changes resulting from therapy or other clinical procedures.