Detection of Human Falls on Furniture Using Scene Analysis Based on Deep Learning and Activity Characteristics

Automatic human fall detection is one important research topic in caring for vulnerable people, such as elders at home and patients in medical places. Over the past decade, numerous methods aiming at solving the problem were proposed. However, the existing methods only focus on detecting human themselves and cannot work effectively in complicated environments, especially for the falls on furniture. To alleviate this problem, a new method for human fall detection on furniture using scene analysis based on deep learning and activity characteristics is presented in this paper. The proposed method first performs scene analysis using a deep learning method faster R-CNN to detect human and furniture. Meanwhile, the space relation between human and furniture is detected. The activity characteristics of the detected people, such as human shape aspect ratio, centroid, motion speed are detected and tracked. Through measuring the changes of these characteristics and judging the relations between the people and furniture nearby, the falls on furniture can be effectively detected. Experiment results demonstrated that our approach not only accurately and effectively detected falls on furniture, such as sofa and chairs but also distinguished them from other fall-like activities, such as sitting or lying down, while the existing methods have difficulties to handle these. In our experiments, our algorithm achieved 94.44% precision, 94.95% recall, and 95.50% accuracy. The proposed method can be potentially used and integrated as a medical assistance in health care and medical places and appliances.