Extracting Body Landmarks from Videos for Parkinson Gait Analysis

Patients with Parkinson disease (PD) exhibit a gait disorder called festinating gait which is caused by deficiency of dopamine in the basal ganglia. To analyze gait of patients with PD, different spatiotemporal parameters such as stride length, cadence, and walking speed should be calculated. This paper aims to present a method to extract useful information represented by the positions of certain landmarks on the human body that can be used for analysis of PD patients' gait. This method is tested using 132 videos collected from 7 PD patients and 7 healthy controls. The positions of 4 body landmarks, namely body's center of gravity (COG), the position of the head, and the position of the feet, was computed using a total of more than 41000 of video frames. Results of object's movement plots show high level of accuracy in the calculation of the body landmarks.