Computing and evaluating view-normalized body part trajectories

This paper proposes an approach to compute and evaluate view-normalized body part trajectories of pedestrians from monocular video sequences. The proposed approach uses the 2D trajectories of both feet and of the head extracted from the tracked silhouettes. On that basis, it segments the walking trajectory into piecewise linear segments. Finally, a normalization process is applied to head and feet trajectories over each obtained straight walking segment. View normalization makes head and feet trajectories appear as if seen from a fronto-parallel viewpoint. The latter is assumed to be optimal for gait modeling and identification purposes. The proposed approach is fully automatic as it requires neither manual initialization nor camera calibration. An extensive experimental evaluation of the proposed approach confirms the validity of the normalization process.