Measuring pedestrian gait using low resolution infrared people counters

This thesis describes research conducted into the measure- ment of pedestrian movement. It starts with an examination of current pedestrian detection and tracking systems, looking at several different technologies including image-processing systems. It highlights, as other authors have, that there is still a substantial gap between the abilities of existing pedestrian measurement and tracking systems and the requirements of users of such systems. After the review it provides an introduction to human gait and its use as a biometric. It then examines the IRISYS people counter, a low resolution infrared detector, used for this research. The detector's advantages and disadvantages are discussed, a detailed description of the data produced is provided. The thesis then describes in detail a study establishing that human gait information can be measured by the IRISYS people counter. It examines the use of the detectors in stereo to measure the height of the people; however the results are not impressive. During this investigation the presence of oscillations likely to relate to this walking gait is noted in the data. A second study is carried out confirming that the noted oscillation originates from human gait and further data is gathered to enable the development of measurement algorithms. The magnitude of the walking oscillation noted is examined in detail. It is found to be both individualistic and highly correlated to gender. A gender distribution algorithm is presented and evaluated on data captured in two different locations. These show very promising results. Several different methods are described for processing the infor-mation to extract a measure of cadence. The cadence is found to be individualistic and shows interesting correlations to height and leg length. This thesis advances the field of pedestrian measurement by conducting pedestrian motion studies and developing algorithms for measuring human gait.