Video Based Accurate Step Counting for Treadmills

Abstract

The number of steps can be used to measure the distance, intensity, frequency, and oxygen consumption of the human activities indirectly, it has great significance to evaluate the amount of human movement. Different from traditional methods which based on wearable sensors, video based methods have the advantages of non-contact. In this paper, we propose a novel infrared video based accurate step counting algorithm for treadmills. Our approach is mainly divided into two parts, e.g., shoulder tracking and step counting. Shoulder movement is less disturbed and can accurately reflect the gait information than other body parts in the processing of running. By tracking the position of the shoulder in the image sequence, and analyzing the peaks and troughs of the trajectory, we can calculate the number of steps accurately in real time. The experiments are conducted on our own datasets, and the result achieved clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords

• shoulder tracking
• step counting
• infrared video