A new skeletal representation based on gait for depression detection

As the challenge of depression problems increases today, it is important to effective and timely detect for patients' treatments and depression prevention. Current methods of automated depression diagnosis depend almost entirely on audio, video, and Electroencephalogram (EEG) etc. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect depression using gait data that is collected by Kinect camera. Its key components include a camera rectification method and a rigid-body representation of the human body. The camera rectification method achieves the purpose of improving data processing accuracy by changing the camera angle. The rigid-body representation can not only improve the robustness of detecting depression patients with noisy input, but also can reduce the classification time. We evaluate our method on the depression gait dataset in postgraduate students. The proposed method has an outstanding performance in classic machine learning algorithms, and the best accuracy can achieve 88.89%. Our solution provides a new method for automatic depression detection (ADD) that has exciting implications in clinical theory and practice, and has the advantages of high accuracy, inexpensive, low time cost, and no-contact.