DynSTG-Mamba: Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graph Mamba with Cross-Graph Knowledge Distillation for Gait Disorders Recognition

Abstract

Gait disorder recognition plays a crucial role in the early diagnosis and monitoring of movement disorders. Existing approaches, including spatio-temporal graph convolutional networks (ST-GCNs), often face high memory demands and struggle to capture complex spatio-temporal dependencies, limiting their efficiency in clinical applications. To address these challenges, we introduce DynSTG-Mamba (Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graph Mamba), a novel framework that combines DF-STGNN and STG-Mamba to enhance motion sequence modeling. The DF-STGNN incorporates a dynamic spatio-temporal filter that adaptively adjusts spatial connections between skeletal joints and temporal interactions across different movement phases. This approach ensures better feature propagation through dynamic graph structures by considering the hierarchical nature and dynamics of skeletal gait data. Meanwhile, STG-Mamba, an extension of Mamba adapted for skeletal motion data, ensures a continuous propagation of states, facilitating the capture of long-term dependencies while reducing computational complexity. To reduce the number of model parameters and computational costs while maintaining consistency, we propose Cross-Graph Relational Knowledge Distillation, a novel knowledge transfer mechanism that aligns relational information between teacher (large architecture) and student models (small architecture) while using shared memory. This ensures that the interactions and movement patterns of the joints are accurately preserved in the motion sequences. We validate our DynSTG-Mamba on KOA-NM, PD-WALK, and ATAXIA datasets, where it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by achieving in terms of Accuracy, F1-score, and Recall. Our results highlight the efficiency and robustness of our approach, offering a lightweight yet highly accurate solution for automated gait analysis and movement disorder assessment.