Fall detection in RGB-D videos by combining shape and motion features

Abstract

This paper addresses issues in fall detection from RGB-D videos. The study focuses on measuring the dynamics of shape and motion of the target person, based on the observation that a fall usually causes drastic large shape deformation and physical movement. The main novelties include: (a) forming contours of target persons in depth images based on morphological skeleton; (b) extracting local dynamic shape and motion features from target contours; (c) encoding global shape and motion in HOG and HOGOF features from RGB images; (d) combining various shape and motion features for enhanced fall detection. Experiments have been conducted on an RGB-D video dataset for fall detection. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.