title: One Small Step for a Man: Estimation of Gender, Age and Height from Recordings of One Step by a Single Inertial Sensor.
abstract: A number of previous works have shown that information about a subject is encoded in sparse kinematic information, such as the one revealed by so-called point light walkers. With the work at hand, we extend these results to classifications of soft biometrics from inertial sensor recordings at a single body location from a single step. We recorded accelerations and angular velocities of 26 subjects using integrated measurement units (IMUs) attached at four locations (chest, lower back, right wrist and left ankle) when performing standardized gait tasks. The collected data were segmented into individual walking steps. We trained random forest classifiers in order to estimate soft biometrics (gender, age and height). We applied two different validation methods to the process, 10-fold cross-validation and subject-wise cross-validation. For all three classification tasks, we achieve high accuracy values for all four sensor locations. From these results, we can conclude that the data of a single walking step (6D: accelerations and angular velocities) allow for a robust estimation of the gender, height and age of a person.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science II, Universität Bonn, Bonn 53113, Germany. qaiser.riaz@uni-bonn.de.
authors.forename: Qaiser
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Riaz
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science II, Universität Bonn, Bonn 53113, Germany. voegele@cs.uni-bonn.de.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vögele
authors.affiliation: Gokhale Method Institute, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. kruegerb@cs.uni-bonn.de.
authors.forename: Björn
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Krüger
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science II, Universität Bonn, Bonn 53113, Germany. weber@cs.uni-bonn.de.
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Weber
mesh_terms: D061725:Accelerometry / Q000295:instrumentation; D000328:Adult; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena / Q000502:physiology; D001699:Biometry / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D001827:Body Height / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005684:Gait / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D016138:Walking / Q000502:physiology
keywords: accelerometers; estimation of soft biometrics; gait analysis; gender, age and height estimation from inertial data; inertial sensors to estimate gender, age and height