Cadence analysis of temporal gait patterns for seismic discrimination between human and quadruped footsteps

This paper reports on a method of cadence analysis for the discrimination between human and quadruped using a cheap seismic sensor. Previous works in the domain of seismic detection of human vs. quadruped have relied on the fundamental gait frequency. Slow movement of quadrupeds can generate the same fundamental gait frequency as human footsteps therefore causing the recognizer to be confused when quadruped are ambling around the sensor. Here we propose utilizing the cadence analysis of temporal gait pattern which provides information on temporal distribution of the gait beats. We also propose a robust method of extracting temporal gait patterns. Features extracted from gait patterns are modeled with optimum number of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). The performance of the system during the test for discriminating between horse, dog, multiple people walk, and single human walk/run was over 95%.