A Lightweight Pathological Gait Recognition Approach Based on a New Gait Template in Side-View and Improved Attention Mechanism

As people age, abnormal gait recognition becomes a critical problem in the field of healthcare. Currently, some algorithms can classify gaits with different pathologies, but they cannot guarantee high accuracy while keeping the model lightweight. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight network (NSVGT-ICBAM-FACN) based on the new side-view gait template (NSVGT), improved convolutional block attention module (ICBAM), and transfer learning that fuses convolutional features containing high-level information and attention features containing semantic information of interest to achieve robust pathological gait recognition. The NSVGT contains different levels of information such as gait shape, gait dynamics, and energy distribution at different parts of the body, which integrates and compensates for the strengths and limitations of each feature, making gait characterization more robust. The ICBAM employs parallel concatenation and depthwise separable convolution (DSC). The former strengthens the interaction between features. The latter improves the efficiency of processing gait information. In the classification head, we choose to employ DSC instead of global average pooling. This method preserves the spatial information and learns the weights of different locations, which solves the problem that the corner points and center points in the feature map have the same weight. The classification accuracies for this paper’s model on the self-constructed dataset and GAIT-IST dataset are 98.43% and 98.69%, which are 0.77% and 0.59% higher than that of the SOTA model, respectively. The experiments demonstrate that the method achieves good balance between lightweightness and performance.