Fall detection in indoor environment with kinect sensor

Falls are one of the major risks of injury for elderly living alone at home. Computer vision-based systems offer a new, low-cost and promising solution for fall detection. This paper presents a new fall-detection tool, based on a commercial RGB-D camera. The proposed system is capable of accurately detecting several types of falls, performing a real time algorithm in order to determine whether a fall has occurred. The proposed approach is based on evaluating the contraction and the expansion speed of the width, height and depth of the 3D human bounding box, as well as its position in the space. Our solution requires no pre-knowledge of the scene (i.e. the recognition of the floor in the virtual environment) with the only constraint about the knowledge of the RGB-D camera position in the room. Moreover, the proposed approach is able to avoid false positive as: sitting, lying down, retrieve something from the floor. Experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively show the quality of the proposed approach in terms of both robustness and background and speed independence. © 2014 IEEE.