TAAI2015 Tainan, Taiwan Nov.
20-22, 2015
Fall down detection for surveillance system of
health care
Wei Quan
Graduate School of System Design
Tokyo Metropolitan University
Tokyo, Japan 191-0065
Email: quan-weil@ed.tmu.ac.jp
Abstract-Since the world technology grows faster and faster,
the people is becoming much more health than ever before, thus
getting longer of living age. On the other hand however, the
rising number of elderly people also course the problem such
as the aging of population. One case is that the population of
elderly who live alone is increasing and more assistance should
support on the situation the health care resource is less. Thus we
proposed the surveillance system to apply for this situation. This
paper focuses on the surveillance system which focuses on the
individual house to detect the unmoral behavior such as falling
down when elderly people lives alone. And comparing with the
most popular methodology such as Aspect Ratios, the method
we proposed has conquered its weakness and performed will in
most situations.
I. INTRODUCTION
The rapid development of Computer Science, video surveil­
lance system has been widely used in various fields such as
bank surveillance and pedestrian tracking, etc[5]. On the other
hand, requirement also becomes overwhelming tendency for
video surveillance system.
Camera tracking system has become a common need in
the today's society. This system is dealt in biometrics and
situation/context awareness technologies. Currently, the bio­
metric technology is widely used in the real world situation.
Contrarily, the increase use of the camera tracking system has
resulted to linear decrease of its price each year.
In recent years, image processing has been used in lots of
fields such as bank surveillance and pedestrian tracking [3] [6].
Background Construction system which using static sensors
can be used in the area of static situation such as plaza mall,
ATM, etc. Nevertheless, despite it's wide application for public
security, the increasing number of ordinary fields have intro­
duced the surveillance system for the more convenient life.
For example, the house surveillance system for elderly people
who live alone. According to the World Health Organization,
approximately 28-35% of people aged 65 and over fall each
year increasing to 32-42% for those over 70 years of age. And
falls are a major cause of fatal injury especially for the elderly.
Considering that large part of these aged people live alone, it
is significant that introducing the assistant system automatic
surveillance to support them health care surveillance.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follow: Section
2 briefly reviews the referent methodology of fall detection
978-1-4673-9606-6/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 232
Naoyuki Kubota
Graduate School of System Design
Tokyo Metropolitan University
Tokyo, Japan 191-0065
Email: Naokubota@nifty.com
system. In Section 3, we will briefly explain the main steps
of the whole system, and the proposed methodology for
fall detection will explained in section 4. Further experiment
results will be presented in Section 5. Last but not least, the
final section will draw the conclusions and future extension.
II. REV IEW
According to [1], the fall detection system can be broadly
categorized into two types: wearable device based system
and context-aware system. The first type briefly includes the
collaboration between the aware sensor (in most cases the
sensor is camera) and the wearable device. The vast majority
of wearable fall detectors are in the form of accelerometer
devices. Some of them also incorporate other sensors such as
gyroscopes to obtain information about the patient's position.
By wearing these assist device the data will get much more
exact and complicated.
Nevertheless, since the fall detection system always serve
the people, we should considering that elderly people always
forget to put on the device. By missing the wearable device
the whole system will decrease the accuracy largely and will
ignore some accident, thus we will have to remind the elderly
to wear their device, This seems much less convenience.
Based on this truth, we focus on the research of second type,
i.e. context-aware system. Handling and computing all the
information from the data that sent only from the camera.
Or we can even using embedded device such as DSP ships to
compute the image data since it is collected by the camera.
III. SYSTEM O V ERV IEW
The system is similar to the other tracking system. The
main flow follows the : background construction/foreground
abstract, foreground extraction, foreground human modeling
and fall detection system, which can be seen in figure 1. And
this part will explain each step respectively.
A. Background Construction/Foreground abstract
In most cases, the cameras settled in the house are fixed in
some certain places such as the roof and the corner of wall.
Thus in most time the image that shot by cameras are the
same. Based on this, background model. In video surveillance
system, the sensors are typically stationary and scene of the
 TAAI2015
Human
Foreground
Video Foreground Modeling
Object
frames Detection (Head
Extract
Detection)
Fig. 1. The main flow of the fall detection system.
monitor is static in the most part of time, thus it is possible to
construct a background and detect change for monitoring[7].
Different from certain fast-tracking algorithms, research based
on the foreground detecting provides more accurate monitoring
effort in video tracking.
Background modeling is often applied in various applica­
tions to model the background and detect the moving objects in
the scene like in video surveillance, optical motion capture and
multimedia. The simplest way to model the background is to
acquire a background image which doesn't include any moving
object. In certain conditions, the background is unavailable and
always be changed under critical situations like illumination
changes, objects being introduced or removed from the scene.
To handle these problems of robustness and adaptation, many
background modeling methods have been developed and the
most recent surveys can be found. These background modeling
methods can be classified in the following categories: Ba­
sic Background Modeling, Statistical Background Modeling,
Fuzzy Background Modeling and Background Estimation.
Other classifications can be found in term of prediction , recur­
sion , adaptation, or modality. All these modeling approaches
are used in background subtraction context which presents the
following steps and issues: background modeling, background
initialization, background maintenance, foreground detection,
choice of the feature size (pixel, a block or a cluster), choice of
the feature type (color features, edge features, stereo features,
motion features and texture features).
Based on the methods which have mentioned before, we can
classify them into several types: most of these are based on the
statistical model which means catching the suddenly change
of gray or color density for a pixel that appears in the scenes.
Among these mature algorithms, most understandable method
is just to calculate the maximum and minimum values of gray
scale for each pixel and the absolute difference between two
coherent images. For a pixel in a sequence of image, the pixel
in this frame will be regarded as a foreground pixel if the
absolute value is larger than a threshold. But because of its
simplified structure, it performs less ideal when applied in
some complicated situations. Thus Gaussian distribution was
presented for the construction of probability density function
(pdf) for each pixel to get the foreground. However, single
Gaussian model cannot handle some certain situation such as
the density of a pixel has several distribution ranges, thus Chris
Stauffer and W.E.L Grimson proposed the Gaussian Mixture
Tainan, Taiwan Nov. 20-22, 2015
_ 0
Fall
detection
Evaluation
Fig. 2. The result of foreground detection by CodeBook. The top is original
image, and the bottom is foreground flxels
Model (GMM) which using several Gaussian distributions to
represent the probability density function to handle the obsta­
cle of situation mentioned before. To make background and
foreground modeling more multifarious, in 2002, Elgammal,
A. et al. proposed a method to construct the background pdf by
using kernel density estimation. Construct probability density
function of background for each pixel in the image by the
kernel function is constructed by every sample data separately.
Reading the literature, two remarks can be made: (1) The
most used model is the pixel-wise MOG one proposed by
Stauffer and Grimson due to a good compromise between
robustness to the critical situations and the constraints (CT,
MR). (2) There are many improvements of this MOG model as
shown by the different acronyms found like GMM, TLGMM,
STGMM, SKMGM, TAPPMOG and STAPPMOG. (3) Other
proposed method such as Kernel Density Estimation is also
widely used in video tracking system for background construc­
tion and foreground detection. All the developed strategies
attempt to be more rigorous statistically or to introduce spatial
and/or temporal constraints. The objective is to group these
different strategies in one paper and classify them following
the different steps and issues of the MOG model. The idea is
not to present a numeric comparative evaluation using ROC
or PDR analysis of the different algorithms due their large
number and because this evaluation can be generally found in
the related paper.
In our system, we chose CodeBook algorithm to construct
the background and detect foreground. The codeBook was
proposed by Kyungnam Kim, etc [2]. Comparison with other
multimode modeling algorithms shows that the codebook
algorithm has good properties on several background modeling
problems. The result can be seen in figure 2.
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 TAAI2015 Tainan, Taiwan Nov. 20-22, 2015

• CORE POINT

• E < '"

• NOISE POINT

Fig. 3. The illustration of DBSCAN algorithms

B. Foreground Extraction

Even though various clustering algorithms can be applied,

clustering in video surveillance has many restrictions. For
example, K-means algorithm is one of the most famous
clustering algorithms because of its efficient perform. Despite
these advantages, several features make it unsuitable for clus­
tering in video surveillance such as it has to initial k before
calculation and cannot exclude noise, etc. For the reason of
self-adaptive, an algorithm should be selected and applied in
video monitoring.
In order to make sure the accuracy, we chose DBSCAN
algorithm to fulfill this part. DBSCAN is a density-based
clustering algorithm. The foreground detection only gives the
foreground individual pixels, without any other information.
Hence we have to know some detail such as the shape of
tracking objects. Thus have to choose a cluster algorithm for
the ROI extraction[4].
The main step of the DBSCAN may have three: core point
extraction, edge point extraction and noise point exclusion.
Core point is the point whose density within its area is larger
than a certain threshold. The result of extraction can be seen
in figure 3.
IV. HUMAN FALL DETECTION
Since we have extracted the foreground human shape by the
steps described above, the only step left is the fall detection. As
we explained before, Aspect ratio[8] can detect the fall expect
some special cases, for instance, when the people fall towards
or back to the direction of the camera. In this situation, since
the people only change the length of height, the ratio of the
height and width will not change strongly, aspect ratio detector
may sometimes ignore this accident, thus some terrible result
would be happen.
Even there exit various kinds of human models, even some
of them are extremely close to the original human model, there
is still lack of suitable model for fall down detection. Among
these algorithms, Aspect Ratio of human height and width is
used most frequently. The structure is quite simple and the
accuracy can be also ideal in most cases. Nevertheless, it still
Fig. 4. The Top part is the original image and the bottom is the result of the
foreground object extraction by using DBSCAN, where red points represent
the edge points
can not recognize the fall of human in some certain case.
Based on this truth, we proposed one simplified model.
The model divides the human shape into two parts: head
and torso. And detect the head and torso respectively and
analysis the relationship between them to analogizing the
human current status at the same time.
For the part of human head, it will be described as the
following:
(1)
where He(x, y) represents the 2-dimensional positional cen­
troid point and Fe refer to the pixels which constructing the
head. Similarity, the torso part can also been defined as the
same. Generally the head is concluded by the hair and the skin.
for the pixel p with the RGB value {r, g, b}, we can evaluate
1.2g < r < 2.2g and
1.2b < r < 2.2b and
60 < r (2)
where the p will be regarded as skin if Skinp is equal to
1, and will be regarded as body otherwise. This method is
under the assumption of the skin color of Asian. By using
this method we can evaluate the position of the face. In case
that some other parts of skin will confuse the analysis, the
color of hair will also introduced to help to identify the head.

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 TAAI2015 Tainan, Taiwan Nov. 20-22, 2015

In our experiment, we expect the people are Asian and the

color of hair are black in most situations.
Despite the head part, the rest part of this foreground object
would be marked as the torso definitely. Similar with the head,
the body part can be also described as:

(3)

where Tc (x, y) represents the centroid position of torso part

and Ft is the total pixels. The torso can be also divided into
body and bottom in further research, but right now we just
regard them as on part for the simplification.
After the head and torso have been constructed, we can
confine the relationship of these two parts. And the relationship Fig. 5. The comparison between Aspect Ratio and proposed method. In this
of them is described as two values here: the angle and distance case both Aspect Ratio and proposed method proposed the alert correctly.

of the centroid points. the two evaluating value e and dist of

a human will be computed by:
figure, the blue and red point represent the center of the head
Yh - Yt and torso respectively. In normal status, in rectangle and the
e = arctan (4)
Xh - Xt line will stay in green, and if the fall detection happens, the
color will turn to red.
And the dist can be computed by Euclidian distance as:
On another situation, which can be seen in figure 6, that the
person fall along the direction of the camera. The top is the
(5)
normal standing status, which both Aspect Ratio and proposed
For the first parameter angel e, the human will be regarded method do not make the alert. In the middle figure, the man sit
as standing(normal status) if the degree of e is within some on the ground, without lying, thus the system did not propose
certain range like : alert either. But in the bottom figure, the man lying on the
ground then the system made the alert. At the same time, we

Status =
{ Unmoral
Normal Threshold1
Otherwise
< e < Threshold2 can see that the alert signal which proposed by Aspect Ratio
still behave normal. Proper setting of the parameter will help
(6) us to distinguish the sitting status and lying status.
In this case, we supposed the Thresholdl and 2 will be equal
VI. CONCLUSION
to 45° and 135° respectively, and any status which is out of
Here we just make a row model for indoor human detection.
this range will be regarded as suspicious and make further
It performed better comparing with the standard Aspect Ratio,
evaluation.
and because the simple structure, it can be also embedded into
Despite these case, there are some other possibilities which
hardware chip such as DSP chip for camera. Nevertheless,
the human fall towards or back to the direction of the camera.
the really situation can be much more complicate then the
We should use other way to conquer this weakness. And for
experiment situation. We will continue working on this topic
the parameter dist, the human will be regarded as fall down
and make deeper research in the future time. And the head
if dist is less then a threshold as:
locating by using skin color is not stable in real situation. We

Status =
{ UNnmora
ormal
l
Threshold3
Otherwise
< dist
(7)
should consider the more stable methods to improve it.
Shadow is another weakness of this system. Considering
that the living house is limit, the shadow would cause a lot of
By combining equation (6) and (7) we can get a method problem. Our future extend would also find a better solution
to evaluate the fall detection status and has ideal performance to solve this problem.
according to the experiment. The detail of the experiment will
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Fig. 6. The comparison between Aspect Ratio and proposed method. The
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