Sharif Digital Repository

To date various commercial systems were used in the gait analysis area. These systems have some difficulties for clinical use, such as being indwell, making trouble in movement and high prices. The Kinect sensor does not have problems of these systems. If the error of sensor is acceptable, Kinect sensor is a suitable choice for application in clinics. The possibility of utilization of the Kinect sensor as a gait analysis system has been studied in this research. The sensor errors in calculation of gait parameters such as lower limb joints angle, stride time, stride length and spatial coordinates of joints were computed. In previous researches the Kinect sensor error has been calculated for... 

Falls are one of the major causes leading to injury of elderly people. Using wearable devices for fall detection has a high cost and may cause inconvenience to the daily lives of the elderly. In this project, we present an automated fall detection approach that requires only a low-cost depth camera. Our approach combines two computer vision techniques, spatio-temporal fall characterization and a learning-based classifier to distinguish falls from other daily actions. A dense set of spatio-temporal feature vectors are computed from video to provide a localized description of the action, and subsequently aggregated in an empirical covariance matrix to compactly represent the action. Then, we... 

In recent years, the national health systems have supported the idea of home-based rehabilitation, since receiving cares at hospital environments is too expensive both in money and time. This method reduces the patients’ commuting to the clinics. Moreover, it enables them to practice the prescribed movements at any time.Most of the existing systems compute the patient’s motion performance in a zero-one manner which does not distinguish any small progress in his condition. Thus, a non-task based method which can assess precisely the patient’s level is yet missing. This project aims to develop a set of motion performance indices which can judge the upper limb motions in a home-based... 

Human facial activity recognition is one of the endeavors to improve human-computer interaction. Recognition of excitements and emotions on human face by machine and makinga corresponding reaction is essential for man machine intraction.The purpose of this project is recognizingactivities such as speaking, eating, laughing, agree and disagree which have more complexity than usualemotions such as fear and happinesscontained in common datasets.So, adataset in accordance with the above mentioned 5 activities was collected and the appropriate feature vector for analyzing these face activities were implemented.Distance between the interest points located on the face were used as parameters in... 

Due to various applications of human motion capture techniques, developing low-cost methods that would be applicable in non-laboratory environments is under consideration. MEMS inertial sensors and Kinect are two low-cost devices that can be utilized in home-based motion capture systems, e.g. home-based rehabilitation. In this work, an unscented Kalman filter approach was developed based on the complementary properties of Kinect and the inertial sensors to fuse the orientation data of these two devices for human arm motion tracking during both stationary shoulder joint position and human body movement. A new measurement model of the fusion algorithm was obtained that can compensate for the... 

In the recent years, development of new technologies in the field of cognitive science has made a huge effect on the people social life style. Facial expression imitation with applications in the design of human robot interaction (HRI) systems is an active area of research. In this study, we propose an approach using a humanoid social robot, The Alice, for real-time imitation of human facial expression. The facial keypoints of the user are extracted by using the Kinect sensor together with manipulated SDK 2.0 codes. Kinect output array are collected for each expression, then the training dataset is created with these output arrays. An accurate Artificial neural network (ANN), which has a... 

Motion capture is a process that movements of living organisms like human or objects are captured and the results are processed for the desired applications. This applications are in rehabilation, sports, film industry and etc. There are many techniques and instruments for motion capture that optical cameras are the most accurate ones. But this cameras are high cost and limited to labs. Some sensors like IMUs and recently, Kinect cameras have been considered by many researchers because these are low cost and easy to use. But problems like bias, accumulated error and occlusion make them to looking for improvments. Fusion algorithms are one of the best methods that help to use from each... 

Human activity recognition is an important and useful area in computer vision that application include surveillance systems, patient monitoring systems, human-computer interaction and analyse video data from big websites.Traditional Human action recognition use the RGB videos as default input that unable describe motion and action as full. On the other hand Kinect camera sendsthe RGB data to output in addition to the Depth Data that allows us to extract skeleton of human easily. Recently Space-time features have been particulary popular in RGB Videos because of their structure. These features are describedby their descriptor and send the good and important information to output.Finally we... 

In recent years with advancement of Robotics, the applications of wide scale use of robots in our homes is not as far-fetched as it was before. One of the important problems for an indoor robot is moving inside a new and unknown environment. To achieve this, the robot should, with the help of its sensors, not only calculate its location; but should also build a map of the environment for later use. Additionally, the robot must be able to explore this unknown environment. The most important drawbacks of the classical solutions to these problems are long computation times, heavy memory usage and absence of precision. In recent years, large amount of research effort has put on solving these... 

To date various commercial systems were used in the gait analysis area. These systems have some difficulties for clinical use, such as being indwell, making trouble in movement and high prices. The Kinect sensor does not have problems of these systems. If the error of sensor is acceptable, Kinect sensor is a suitable choice for application in clinics. The possibility of utilization of the Kinect sensor as a gait analysis system has been studied in this research. The sensor errors in calculation of gait parameters for lower limb joints angle were computed. In previous researches the Kinect sensor error has been calculated for upper limb joints angle and the subject was standing motionless in... 

Sign Language Recognition using cameras is an alternative way of human communication with personal computers. These systems don’t need to use keyboard. They are used when touching keyboard is not possible or for what ever reason, when we don’t want to use keyboard. In this problem the person shows one of the alphabets with his hand and we capture and process that in real-time to recognize the letter. The problem of previous works in this area are the decreasing rate of detection in condition where the angle of sign and viewer changes. The purpose of our work is getting better result by using depth image from Kinect. We use Pugeault and Bowden dataset (that has fingerspelling sign in multiple... 

Parkinson's disease is the most common progressive neurological disorder after Alzheimer, which is associated with motor disabilities. One of the most effective ways to improve patient’s condition with this disease, is rehabilitation.Assessment of the patient during rehabilitation is very important in order to give a better understanding of patient's status to the specialist, but qualitative assessment methods in traditional rehabilitation are ineffective in fast and accurate evaluation of the patient's condition; and because of their need for patient’s attendance in clinic, they will incur huge medical costs. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to present a quantitative method to... 

Low back pain is one of the most prevalent musculoskeletal injuries in occupational activities. In order to reduce or prevent it, it is necessary to estimate the mechanical loads of body joints. Direct measurement of spinal loads is invasive and costly. Therefore, musculoskeletal modeling is a convenient tool in estimation of joints and muscles loads that often uses kinematics information as input.Marker-based motion capture systems are one of the most common ways for the estimation of body kinematics. Unfortunately, they are time consuming and expensive. Thus being marker-free and low-cost, Microsoft Kinect is a suitable alternative. Recent studies often have investigated accuracy of... 

Parkinson's disease, after Alzheimer's, is the most important and common progressive neurodegenerative disorders. There are various methods for assessing the quality of patients’ movements. One of them is biomechanical methods. The application of these methods in telerehabilitation has been considered by many researchers. Telerehabilitation improves the efficiency of the therapists and reduces problems such as commute costs, traffic stress, and patient fatigue.In the present study, 21 Parkinson patients were treated and evaluated remotely using SANA system. This study aimed to investigate the effects of the therapist absence during the tele-assessment and its impact on the validity and... 

Parkinson's disease is a destructive and long-term disease of the central nervous system. This disease especially affects the motor system. Parkinson's patients can be studied under dopaminergic and non-dopaminergic conditions. The non-dopaminergic state means not taking the drug, for at least 12 hours, and the dopaminergic state, from one hour to less than 12 hours after taking the usual dose of the dopaminergic drug. The aim of this study is to examine and compare the statistics and characteristics of Parkinson's patients in dopaminergic and non-dopaminergic states, focusing on reaching and tracking activities. It also aims to analyze the differences before and after rehabilitation in...