Abstract
Accidental falls of elderly people are a major cause of fatal injuries, especially for those living alone. We present a novel vision–based fall detection approach that analyzes an extracted human body using described human postures. First, a human body extracted by a background subtraction technique is located by a minimum area-enclosing ellipse. Then, a normalized directional histogram is developed around the center of the ellipse to represent a human posture by multi-directional statistical analysis. After that, 12 static and 8 dynamic features are derived from the normalized directional histogram. These features are fed into a directed acyclic graph support vector machine to distinguish four closely related human postures (standing, crouching, lying, and sitting). A fall-like accident is detected by counting the occurrences of lying postures in a short temporal window. After conducting majority voting, a fall event is determined by immobility verification. From the experimental results, an overall accu...
Highlights
Falls and fall-related injuries are a major public health problem for aging populations all over the world
We present the performance of our fall detection system
We have proposed a novel vision–based fall detection approach characterized by the utilization of human postures
Summary
Falls and fall-related injuries are a major public health problem for aging populations all over the world. According to the statistics of the World Health Organization,[1] approximately 28%–35% of people aged 65 and over fall every year, and this rate increases to 32% or even 42% for those over 70 years old This makes falls one of the five most common causes of death among elderly people.[2,3,4] The medical expenses caused by the immense number of falls occurring every year have become a heavy burden for the population of China and of other countries with the aging problem. Commercial fall detection systems are mostly based on wearable sensors, which elderly people may forget to wear It is not very convenient for them to carry these devices at all times.
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