Evaluation of convolutional neural networks for the classification of falls from heterogeneous thermal vision sensors

The automatic detection of falls within environments where sensors are deployed has attracted considerable research interest due to the prevalence and impact of falling people, especially the elderly. In this work, we analyze the capabilities of non-invasive thermal vision sensors to detect falls using several architectures of convolutional neural networks. First, we integrate two thermal vision sensors with different capabilities: (1) low resolution with a wide viewing angle and (2) high resolution with a central viewing angle. Second, we include fuzzy representation of thermal information. Third, we enable the generation of a large data set from a set of few images using ad hoc data augmentation, which increases the original data set size, generating new synthetic images. Fourth, we define three types of convolutional neural networks which are adapted for each thermal vision sensor in order to evaluate the impact of the architecture on fall detection performance. The results show encouraging performance in single-occupancy contexts. In multiple occupancy, the low-resolution thermal vision sensor with a wide viewing angle obtains better performance and reduction of learning time, in comparison with the high-resolution thermal vision sensors with a central viewing angle.