Patent ID: 9235895
Filing Date: 2016-01-12
CPC Classification: G01B,G01P,G06K,G06T

Claim Text:
1. A method for estimating a direction of a person standing still, comprising the steps of: detecting a boundary position between a foot and a lower leg of a person in an image acquired by an imaging unit, the boundary position being a substantial boundary part, in a lower limb, between the foot, which is a part from a malleolus to a tip part, and the lower leg; detecting a feature quantity which makes it possible to classify a ground and a part other than the ground in the image; setting, in a peripheral region around the boundary position, a plurality of local regions having positional information and/or direction information relative to the boundary position, and determining whether each of the local regions is the ground or the part other than the ground by using the feature quantity unique to the ground; determining a foot region from the local region determined as the part other than the ground; and estimating a direction of the foot of the person from the local region classified as the foot region and from the information.