Foot Pressure from Video: A Deep Learning Approach to Predict Dynamics from Kinematics

Human gait stability analysis is a key to understanding locomotion and control of body equilibrium, with numerous applications in the fields of Kinesiology, Medicine and Robotics. This work introduces a novel approach to learn dynamics of a human body from kinematics to aid stability analysis. We propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture to regress foot pressure from a human pose derived from video. This approach utilizes human Body-25 joints extracted from videos of subjects performing choreographed Taiji (Tai Chi) sequences using OpenPose estimation. The derived human pose data and corresponding foot pressure maps are used to train a convolutional neural network with residual architecture, termed PressNET, in an end-to-end fashion to predict the foot pressure corresponding to a given human pose. We create the largest dataset for simultaneous video and foot pressure on five subjects containing greater than 350k frames. We perform cross-subject evaluation with data from the five subjects on two versions of PressNET to evaluate the performance of our networks. KNearest Neighbors (KNN) is used to establish a baseline for comparisons and evaluation. We empirically show that PressNet significantly outperform KNN on all the splits.