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Fall detection system using Kinect’s infrared sensor

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel fall detection system based on the Kinect sensor. The system runs in real-time and is capable of detecting walking falls accurately and robustly without taking into account any false positive activities (i.e. lying on the floor). Velocity and inactivity calculations are performed to decide whether a fall has occurred. The key novelty of our approach is measuring the velocity based on the contraction or expansion of the width, height and depth of the 3D bounding box. By explicitly using the 3D bounding box, our algorithm requires no pre-knowledge of the scene (i.e. floor), as the set of detected actions are adequate to complete the process of fall detection.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Jesus Martinez del Rincon and Andy Strong for their invaluable assistance in setting up the experimental environment for the capturing sessions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics, Digital Imaging Research Centre, Kingston University, Surrey, UK

    Georgios Mastorakis & Dimitrios Makris

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  1. Georgios Mastorakis
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  2. Dimitrios Makris
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Correspondence to Georgios Mastorakis.

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Mastorakis, G., Makris, D. Fall detection system using Kinect’s infrared sensor. J Real-Time Image Proc 9, 635–646 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-012-0246-9

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