Shoes as a Platform for Vision

What: We are exploring the use of a shoe-mounted camera as a sensory system for wearable computing. We are developing a system called Platform Shoe which is useful for gait analysis, obstacle detection, and context recognition [2]. Platform Shoe uses visual information alone to detect periods of stability and motion during walking – no inertial sensor is required. In the stable phase of walking, the foot can be assumed to be parallel to the ground plane. In this condition, the floor dominates the lower part of the camera’s view, and Platform Shoe can segment the floor out from the remainder of the scene, leaving walls and obstacles. This in turn facilitates floor surface recognition for context awareness.