A method for real-time detection of human fall from video

In this paper we present a method for real-time detection of human fall from video for support of elderly people living alone in their homes. The detection algorithm has four steps: background estimation, extraction of moving objects, motion feature extraction, and fall detection. The detection is based on features that quantify dynamics of human motion and body orientation. The algorithms are implemented in C++ using the OpenCV library. The method is tested using a single camera and 20 test video recordings showing typical fall scenarios and regular household behaviour. The experimental results show 90% of human fall detection accuracy

Intelligent computer vision processing techniques for fall detection in enclosed environments

Detecting unusual movement (falls) for elderly people in enclosed environments is receiving increasing attention and is likely to have massive potential social and economic impact. In this thesis, new intelligent computer vision processing based techniques are proposed to detect falls in indoor environments for senior citizens living independently, such as in intelligent homes. Different types of features extracted from video-camera recordings are exploited together with both background subtraction analysis and machine learning techniques. Initially, an improved background subtraction method is used to extract the region of a person in the recording of a room environment. A selective updating technique is introduced for adapting the change of the background model to ensure that the human body region will not be absorbed into the background model when it is static for prolonged periods of time. Since two-dimensional features can generate false alarms and are not invariant to different directions, more robust three-dimensional features are next extracted from a three-dimensional person representation formed from video-camera measurements of multiple calibrated video-cameras. The extracted three-dimensional features are applied to construct a single Gaussian model using the maximum likelihood technique. This can be used to distinguish falls from non-fall activity by comparing the model output with a single. In the final works, new fall detection schemes which use only one uncalibrated video-camera are tested in a real elderly person s home environment. These approaches are based on two-dimensional features which describe different human body posture. The extracted features are applied to construct a supervised method for posture classification for abnormal posture detection. Certain rules which are set according to the characteristics of fall activities are lastly used to build a robust fall detection model

Fall detection and activity recognition using human skeleton features

Human activity recognition has attracted the attention of researchers around the world. This is an interesting problem that can be addressed in different ways. Many approaches have been presented during the last years. These applications present solutions to recognize different kinds of activities such as if the person is walking, running, jumping, jogging, or falling, among others. Amongst all these activities, fall detection has special importance because it is a common dangerous event for people of all ages with a more negative impact on the elderly population. Usually, these applications use sensors to detect sudden changes in the movement of the person. These kinds of sensors can be embedded in smartphones, necklaces, or smart wristbands to make them “wearable” devices. The main inconvenience is that these devices have to be placed on the subjects’ bodies. This might be uncomfortable and is not always feasible because this type of sensor must be monitored constantly, and can not be used in open spaces with unknown people. In this way, fall detection from video camera images presents some advantages over the wearable sensor-based approaches. This paper presents a vision-based approach to fall detection and activity recognition. The main contribution of the proposed method is to detect falls only by using images from a standard video-camera without the need to use environmental sensors. It carries out the detection using human skeleton estimation for features extraction. The use of human skeleton detection opens the possibility for detecting not only falls but also different kind of activities for several subjects in the same scene. So this approach can be used in real environments, where a large number of people may be present at the same time. The method is evaluated with the UP-FALL public dataset and surpasses the performance of other fall detection and activities recognition systems that use that dataset

A SKELETON FEATURES-BASED FALL DETECTION USING MICROSOFT KINECT V2 WITH ONE CLASS-CLASSIFIER OUTLIER REMOVAL

The real-time and robust fall detection is one of the key components of elderly people care and monitoring systems. Depth sensors, as they became more available, occupy an increasing place in event recognition systems. Some of them can directly produce a skeletal description of the human figure for compact representation of a person’s posture. Skeleton description makes the output of source video or detailed information about the depth outside the system unnecessary and raises the privacy of the entire system. Based on a comparative study of different RGB-D cameras, the most promising model for further development was chosen - Microsoft Kinect v2. The TST Fall Detection Dataset v2 is used here as a base for experiments. The proposed algorithm is based on the skeleton features encoding on the sequence of neighboring frames and support vector machine classifier. A version of a cumulative sum method is applied for combining the individual decisions on the consecutive frames. It is offered to use the one-class classifier for detection of low-quality skeletons. The 0.958 accuracy of our fall detection procedure was obtained in the cross-validation procedure based on the removal of records of a particular person from the database (Leave-one-Person-out)