| Platform Shoe - shoes as a platform for vision |
This work is a collaboration between Paul Fitzpatrick and Charlie Kemp.
When you walk, for part of the time one of your feet is pushed firmly against the ground. This is a great opportunity for a wearable system to analyze your local environment using a forward-looking camera mounted on your shoe, since at that moment it is almost stationary, and in a very well-defined pose with respect to the ground. We are building and testing a prototype system for this purpose.
| Frames taken as the wearer moves from a lobby into to corridor -- there is a change in carpet appearance that our system can detect. |
To test how well periods of relative stability of the foot can be detected using visual information alone, we mounted a camera and an inertial sensor on a sandal and recorded from them simultaneously. The inertial readings were used as an independent measure of the the behavior of the foot.
| visual measurements (first three plots) taken from a forward-looking camera mounted on the shoe can be combined (fourth plot) to deduce the moments of foot rest during walking (fifth plot), as can be verified through comparison with direct inertial measurement (last plot) |
This work has nothing to do with other disreputable applications you might find for shoe-mounted cameras on the internet!
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Related publication: Paul Fitzpatrick and Charles Kemp. Shoes as a platform for vision. Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wearable Computers, ISWC 2003 (pdf). You can also skim a slide show on the subject. |
| Video: Platform Shoe |
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Using a forward-mounted camera on a shoe, a wearable system
can view the wearer's local environment. When the shoe
is pressed against the ground during walking, the image
is stable and in a simple ground-aligned orientation.
This movie shows the camera's perspective, and some
simple estimation of the phase of walking from visual
information. It is sped up by a factor of about two
relative to real-time.
MPEG1 -- (18.4 MB) Length: 1.5 minutes |
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