Weight Estimation from an RGB-D camera in top-view configuration

Abstract

The development of so-called soft-biometrics aims at providing information related to the physical and behavioural characteristics of a person. This paper focuses on body weight estimation based on the observation from a top-view RGB-D camera. In fact, the capability to estimate the weight of a person can be of help in many different applications, from health-related scenarios, to business intelligence and retail analytics. To deal with this issue, a TVWE (Top-View Weight Estimation) framework is proposed with the aim of predicting the weight. The approach relies on the adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that have been trained on depth data. Each network has also been modified in their top section to replace classification with prediction inference. The performance of five state-of-art DNNs have been compared, namely VGG16, ResNet, Inception, DenseNet and Efficient-Net. In addition, a convolutional auto-encoder has also been included for completeness. Considering the limited literature in this domain, the TVWE framework has been evaluated on a new publicly available dataset: “VRAI Weight estimation Dataset”, which also collects, for each subject, labels related to weight, gender, and height. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed methods are suitable for this task, bringing different and significant insights for the application of the solution in different domains.