Video Based Shuffling Step Detection for Parkinsonian Patients Using 3D Convolution

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease which impacts millions of people around the world. In clinical treatments, freezing of gait (FoG) is used as the typical symptom to assess PD patients’ condition. Currently, the assessment of FoG is usually performed through live observation or video analysis by doctors. Considering the aging societies, such a manual inspection based approach may cause serious burdens on the healthcare systems. In this study, we propose a pure video-based method to automatically detect the shuffling step, which is the most indistinguishable type of FoG. Firstly, the RGB silhouettes which only contain legs and feet are fed into the feature extraction module to obtain multi-level features. 3D convolutions are used to aggregate both temporal and spatial information. Then the multi-level features are aggregated by the feature fusion. Skip connections are implemented to reserve information of high resolution and period-wise horizontal pyramid pooling is utilized to fuse both global context and local features. To validate the efficacy of our method, a dataset containing 268 normal gait samples and 362 shuffling step samples is built, on which our method achieves an average detection accuracy of 90.8%. Besides shuffling step detection, we demonstrate that our method can also assess the severity of walking abnormity. Our proposal facilitates a more frequent assessment of FoG with less manpower and lower cost, leading to more accurate monitoring of the patients’ condition.