Gait is a firsthand reflection of health condition. This belief has inspired recent research efforts to automate the analysis of pathological gait, in order to assist physicians in decision-making. However, most of these efforts rely on gait descriptions which are difficult to understand by humans, or on sensing technologies hardly available in ambulatory services. This paper proposes a number of semantic and normalized gait features computed from a single video acquired by a low-cost sensor. Far from being conventional spatio-temporal descriptors, features are aimed at quantifying gait impairment, such as gait asymmetry from several perspectives or falling risk. They were designed to be invariant to frame rate and image size, allowing cross-platform comparisons. Experiments were formulated in terms of two databases. A well-known general-purpose gait dataset is used to establish normal references for features, while a new database, introduced in this work, provides samples under eight different walking styles: one normal and seven impaired patterns. A number of statistical studies were carried out to prove the sensitivity of features at measuring the expected pathologies, providing enough evidence about their accuracy. Graphical Abstract Graphical abstract reflecting main contributions of the manuscript: at the top, a robust, semantic and easy-to-interpret feature set to describe impaired gait patterns; at the bottom, a new dataset consisting of video-recordings of a number of volunteers simulating different patterns of pathological gait, where features were statistically assessed.

This paper introduces a method based on robust statistics to build reliable gait signatures from averaging silhouette descriptions, mainly when gait sequences are affected by severe and persistent defects. The term robust refers to the ability of reducing the impact of silhouette defects (outliers) on the average gait pattern, while taking advantage of clean silhouette regions. An extensive experimental framework was defined based on injecting three types of realistic defects (salt and pepper noise, static occlusion, dynamic occlusion) to clean gait sequences, both separately in an easy setting and jointly in a hard setting. The robust approach was compared against two other operation modes: i) simple mean (weak baseline), and ii) defect exclusion (strong benchmark). Three gait representation methods based on silhouette averaging were used: Gait Energy Image (GEI), Gradient Histogram Energy Image (GHEI), and the joint use of GEI and HOG descriptors. Quality of gait signatures was assessed by their discriminant power in a large number of gait recognition tasks. Non-parametric statistical tests were applied on recognition results, searching for significant differences between operation modes.

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