A Computerized Recognition System for the Home-Based Physiotherapy Exercises Using an RGBD Camera

Computerized recognition of the home based physiotherapy exercises has numerous benefits and it has attracted considerable interest among the computer vision community. However, most methods in the literature view this task as a special case of motion recognition. In contrast, this study proposed to employ the three main components of a physiotherapy exercise (the motion patterns, the stance knowledge, and the exercise object) as different recognition tasks and embed them separately into the recognition system. The low level information about each component is gathered using machine learning methods. Then, a generative Bayesian network was used to recognize the exercise types by combining the information from these sources at an abstract level, which takes the advantage of domain knowledge for a more robust system. Finally, a novel post-processing step is employed to estimate the exercise repetitions counts. The performance evaluation of the system is conducted with a new dataset which contains RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) and depth videos of homebased exercise sessions for commonly applied shoulder and knee exercises. The proposed system works without any body-part segmentation, body-part tracking, joint detection, and temporal segmentation methods. In the end, favorable exercise recognition rates and encouraging results on the estimation of repetition counts were reached.