Motion Estimation-based Human Fall Detection for Visual Surveillance

Abstract

Currently, the world’s elderly population continues to grow at a dramatic rate. As the number of senior citizens increases, detection of someone falling has attracted increasing attention for visual surveillance systems. This paper presents a novel fall-detection algorithm using motion estimation and an integrated spatiotemporal energy map of the object region. The proposed method first extracts a human region using a background subtraction method. Next, we applied an optical flow algorithm to estimate motion vectors, and an energy map is generated by accumulating the detected human region for a certain period of time. We can then detect a fall using k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classification with the previously estimated motion information and energy map. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively detect someone falling in any direction, including at an angle parallel to the camera’s optical axis.