PhD Proposal: Measuring and Analyzing Infant Movement with Focus on Developmental Disorders

Current behavioral research on human development needs non-invasive movement measure instrumentation and automatic tools to sift through high-dimensional movement data. For example, recent results on Autism Spectrum Disorder have linked abnormal infant behavior to motor and social impairments that appear later; the availability of infant movement data is therefore crucial to support a better understanding of what these links are. Up to now, these studies have relied mostly on manual inspections and manipulations of childhood videos and marker-based motion capture that may involve the use of custom-designed suits. However, markers and wires are too bulky and distracting, and the corresponding setups are shown to potentially `compromise the infants' mood, attention and mobility while engaged in tasks, therefore jeopardizing the data quality and derived interpretations. The alternative would be not to use markers at all, and rely on automatic pose estimation from images or video. Although computer vision has potential to help, state-of-the-art pose estimation research has rarely considered infants, except for perhaps a couple of cases for which results were limited to ad-hoc scenarios and are evaluated not on the basis of the movement data produced, but in terms of the underlying applications’ goals. We thus propose to treat infant pose estimation as a special problem by trying to explore the patterns of physique, behavior, and cognition that are known to be particular to infants plus other non-pictorial aspects to augment previous pose estimation models and to produce a custom solution. On the analysis side, our approach is to cut down dimensionality by decomposing action matrices and looking at how factors and parameters distribute for the different populations under consideration. The factorization method is inspired in computational models of motor synergies and biological motion perception.
Examining Committee:
Committee Chair: - Dr. Yiannis Aloimonos
Dept. Rep: - Dr. Amitabh Varshney
Committee Members: - Dr. Cornelia Fermuller
- Dr. Jane Clark