Fall Detection and Direction Judgment Based on Posture Estimation

For the problem of elderly people falling easily, it is very necessary to correctly detect the occurrence of falls and provide early warning, which can greatly reduce the injury caused by falls. Most of the existing fall detection algorithms require the monitored persons to carry wearable devices, which will bring inconvenience to their lives and few algorithms pay attention to the direction of the fall. Therefore, we propose a video-based fall detection and direction judgment method based on human posture estimation for the first time. We predict the joint point coordinates of each human body through the posture estimation network, and then use the SVM classifier to detect falls. Next, we will use the three-dimensional human posture information to judge the direction of the fall. Compared to the existing methods, our method has a great improvement in sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy which reaches 95.86, 99.5, and 97.52 on the Le2i fall dataset, respectively, whereas on the UR fall dataset, they are 95.45, 100, and 97.43, respectively.