This paper reviews the recent literature on technologies and methodologies for quantitative human gait analysis in the context of neurodegnerative diseases. The use of technological instruments can be of great support in both clinical diagnosis and severity assessment of these pathologies. In this paper, sensors, features and processing methodologies have been reviewed in order to provide a highly consistent work that explores the issues related to gait analysis. First, the phases of the human gait cycle are briefly explained, along with some nonnormal gait patterns (gait abnormalities) typical of some neurodegenerative diseases. The work continues with a survey on the publicly available datasets principally used for comparing results. Then the paper reports the most common processing techniques for both feature selection and extraction and for classification and clustering. Finally, a conclusive discussion on current open problems and future directions is outlined.

Neurodegenerative diseases are particular diseases whose decline can partially or completely compromise the normal course of life of a human being. In order to increase the quality of patient's life, a timely diagnosis plays a major role. The analysis of neurodegenerative diseases, and their stage, is also carried out by means of gait analysis. Performing early stage neurodegenerative disease assessment is still an open problem. In this paper, the focus is on modeling the human gait movement pattern by using the kinematic theory of rapid human movements and its sigma-lognormal model. The hypothesis is that the kinematic theory of rapid human movements, originally developed to describe handwriting patterns, and used in conjunction with other spatio-temporal features, can discriminate neurodegenerative diseases patterns, especially in early stages, while analyzing human gait with 2D cameras. The thesis empirically demonstrates its effectiveness in describing neurodegenerative patterns, when used in conjunction with state-of-the-art pose estimation and feature extraction techniques. The solution developed achieved 99.1% of accuracy using velocity-based, angle-based and sigma-lognormal features and left walk orientation. INDEX TERMS pose-estimation, computer vision, computer aided diagnosis, gait analysis, machine learning, early neurodegenerative diseases assessment, kinematic theory of rapid human movements, sigma-lognormal

Automatic traffic flow classification is useful to reveal road congestions and accidents. Nowadays, roads and highways are equipped with a huge amount of surveillance cameras, which can be used for real-time vehicle identification, and thus providing traffic flow estimation. This research provides a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art object detectors, visual features, and classification models useful to implement traffic state estimations. More specifically, three different object detectors are compared to identify vehicles. Four machine learning techniques are successively employed to explore five visual features for classification aims. These classic machine learning approaches are compared with the deep learning techniques. This research demonstrates that, when methods and resources are properly implemented and tested, results are very encouraging for both methods, but the deep learning method is the most accurately performing one reaching an accuracy of 99.9% for binary traffic state classification and 98.6% for multiclass classification.

Vehicular traffic flow prediction for a specific day of the week in a specific time span is valuable information. Local police can use this information to preventively control the traffic in more critical areas and improve the viability by decreasing, also, the number of accidents. In this paper, a novel generative deep learning architecture for time series analysis, inspired by the Google DeepMind’ Wavenet network, called TrafficWave, is proposed and applied to traffic prediction problem. The technique is compared with the most performing state-of-the-art approaches: stacked auto encoders, long–short term memory and gated recurrent unit. Results show that the proposed system performs a valuable MAPE error rate reduction when compared with other state of art techniques.

No abstract