Using Deep Neural Networks for Human Fall Detection Based on Pose Estimation

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Jun 16;22(12):4544. doi: 10.3390/s22124544.

Abstract

Requests for caring for and monitoring the health and safety of older adults are increasing nowadays and form a topic of great social interest. One of the issues that lead to serious concerns is human falls, especially among aged people. Computer vision techniques can be used to identify fall events, and Deep Learning methods can detect them with optimum accuracy. Such imaging-based solutions are a good alternative to body-worn solutions. This article proposes a novel human fall detection solution based on the Fast Pose Estimation method. The solution uses Time-Distributed Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (TD-CNN-LSTM) and 1Dimentional Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN) models, to classify the data extracted from image frames, and achieved high accuracies: 98 and 97% for the 1D-CNN and TD-CNN-LSTM models, respectively. Therefore, by applying the Fast Pose Estimation method, which has not been used before for this purpose, the proposed solution is an effective contribution to accurate human fall detection, which can be deployed in edge devices due to its low computational and memory demands.

Keywords: computer vision; deep learning; image analysis; machine learning.

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Humans
  • Neural Networks, Computer*

Grants and funding

This article is a result of the project Safe Cities—“Inovação para Construir Cidades Seguras”, with reference POCI-01-0247-FEDER-041435, co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement.