Shoes as a platform for vision
We explore the use of a shoe-mounted camera as a sensorysystem for wearable computing. We demonstrate toolsuseful for gait analysis, obstacle detection, and contextrecognition. Using only visual information, we detect periodsof stability and motion during walking. In the stablephase, the foot can be assumed to be parallel to the groundplane. In this condition, the floor dominates the lower partof the camera's view, and we show that it can be segmentedout from the remainder of the scene, leaving walls and obstacles.We also demonstrate floor surface recognition forcontext awareness.