Fall detection with a non-intrusive and first-person vision approach

Xueyi Wang*, Estefanía Talavera Martínez, Dimka Karastoyanova, George Azzopardi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
69 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Falls have been widely recognized as one of the most dangerous incidents for the elderly and other people with mobility limitations. This problem has attracted wide scientific interest, which has led to several investigations based on non-vision wearable sensors and static cameras. We investigate the challenge of fall detection and recognition using egocentric wearable cameras, which besides portability and affordability, capture visual information that can be further leveraged for a broad set of lifelogging applications. In this work, five volunteers were equipped with two cameras each, one attached to the neck and the other to the waist. They were asked to simulate four kinds of falls and nine types of non-falls. The newly collected dataset consists of 5858 short video clips, which we make available online. The proposed approach is a late fusion methodology that combines spatial and motion descriptors along with deep features extracted by a pre-trained convolutional neural network. For the spatial and deep features, we consider the similarity of such features between frames in regular intervals of a given time window. In this way, it is the transition between such frames that are encoded in our approach, while the actual scene content does not play a role. We design several experiments to investigate the best camera location and performance for indoor and outdoor activities and employ leave-one-subject-out cross validation to test the generalization ability of our approach. For the fall detection (i.e. two-class) problem, our approach achieves 91.8% accuracy, 93.6% sensitivity and 89.2% specificity.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)28304 - 28317
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Sensors Journal
Volume23
Issue number22
Early online date19-Sept-2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15-Nov-2023

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