Radar and RGB-depth sensors for fall detection: a review

This paper reviews recent works in the literature on the use of systems based on radar and RGB-Depth (RGB-D) sensors for fall detection, and discusses outstanding research challenges and trends related to this research field. Systems to detect reliably fall events and promptly alert carers and first responders have gained significant interest in the past few years in order to address the societal issue of an increasing number of elderly people living alone, with the associated risk of them falling and the consequences in terms of health treatments, reduced well-being, and costs. The interest in radar and RGB-D sensors is related to their capability to enable contactless and non-intrusive monitoring, which is an advantage for practical deployment and users’ acceptance and compliance, compared with other sensor technologies, such as video-cameras, or wearables. Furthermore, the possibility of combining and fusing information from The heterogeneous types of sensors is expected to improve the overall performance of practical fall detection systems. Researchers from different fields can benefit from multidisciplinary knowledge and awareness of the latest developments in radar and RGB-D sensors that this paper is discussing

A framework for cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) scene retrieval from medical simulation videos based on object and activity detection.

In this thesis, we propose a framework to detect and retrieve CPR activity scenes from medical simulation videos. Medical simulation is a modern training method for medical students, where an emergency patient condition is simulated on human-like mannequins and the students act upon. These simulation sessions are recorded by the physician, for later debriefing. With the increasing number of simulation videos, automatic detection and retrieval of specific scenes became necessary. The proposed framework for CPR scene retrieval, would eliminate the conventional approach of using shot detection and frame segmentation techniques. Firstly, our work explores the application of Histogram of Oriented Gradients in three dimensions (HOG3D) to retrieve the scenes containing CPR activity. Secondly, we investigate the use of Local Binary Patterns in Three Orthogonal Planes (LBPTOP), which is the three dimensional extension of the popular Local Binary Patterns. This technique is a robust feature that can detect specific activities from scenes containing multiple actors and activities. Thirdly, we propose an improvement to the above mentioned methods by a combination of HOG3D and LBP-TOP. We use decision level fusion techniques to combine the features. We prove experimentally that the proposed techniques and their combination out-perform the existing system for CPR scene retrieval. Finally, we devise a method to detect and retrieve the scenes containing the breathing bag activity, from the medical simulation videos. The proposed framework is tested and validated using eight medical simulation videos and the results are presented

High-Level Descriptors for Fall Event Detection Supported by a Multi-Stream Network

The need for assertive video classification has been increasingly in demand. Especially for detecting endangering situations, it is crucial to have a quick response to avoid triggering more serious problems. During this work, we target video classification concerning falls. Our study focuses on the use of high-level descriptors able to correctly characterize the event. These descriptor results will serve as inputs to a multi-stream architecture of VGG-16 networks. Therefore, our proposal is based on the analysis of the best combination of high-level extracted features for the binary classification of videos. This approach was tested on three known datasets, and has proven to yield similar results as other more consuming methods found in the literature

Comprehensive review of vision-based fall detection systems

Vision-based fall detection systems have experienced fast development over the last years. To determine the course of its evolution and help new researchers, the main audience of this paper, a comprehensive revision of all published articles in the main scientific databases regarding this area during the last five years has been made. After a selection process, detailed in the Materials and Methods Section, eighty-one systems were thoroughly reviewed. Their characterization and classification techniques were analyzed and categorized. Their performance data were also studied, and comparisons were made to determine which classifying methods best work in this field. The evolution of artificial vision technology, very positively influenced by the incorporation of artificial neural networks, has allowed fall characterization to become more resistant to noise resultant from illumination phenomena or occlusion. The classification has also taken advantage of these networks, and the field starts using robots to make these systems mobile. However, datasets used to train them lack real-world data, raising doubts about their performances facing real elderly falls. In addition, there is no evidence of strong connections between the elderly and the communities of researchers

A Methodology for Extracting Human Bodies from Still Images

Monitoring and surveillance of humans is one of the most prominent applications of today and it is expected to be part of many future aspects of our life, for safety reasons, assisted living and many others. Many efforts have been made towards automatic and robust solutions, but the general problem is very challenging and remains still open. In this PhD dissertation we examine the problem from many perspectives. First, we study the performance of a hardware architecture designed for large-scale surveillance systems. Then, we focus on the general problem of human activity recognition, present an extensive survey of methodologies that deal with this subject and propose a maturity metric to evaluate them. One of the numerous and most popular algorithms for image processing found in the field is image segmentation and we propose a blind metric to evaluate their results regarding the activity at local regions. Finally, we propose a fully automatic system for segmenting and extracting human bodies from challenging single images, which is the main contribution of the dissertation. Our methodology is a novel bottom-up approach relying mostly on anthropometric constraints and is facilitated by our research in the fields of face, skin and hands detection. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methodologies demonstrate the success of our approach