How to detect human fall in video? An overview

Every year, thousands of elderly people are victim of a fall incident. Sometimes with severe consequences such as hip fractures or even death but, in many cases, the main problem is that an injured elderly may be laying on the ground for several hours or even days after a fall incident has occurred. This makes it important to have a fall detection system. Commercial types of fall detection systems are mostly based on wearable sensors, which the elderly may forget to wear. Although we will give a short presentation of these sensor-based devices, this paper focusses on the existing approaches to detect a fall in video. Therefore we have to deal with the different types of background subtraction. After having studied the practical approaches for background subtraction, we went further to the next step in the algorithm, namely fall detection itself. Beside these specific techniques, we also give an overview in difficulties while implementing a fall detection algorithm. In our conclusion we will see that all systems studied in this paper have their own advantages and disadvantages. To become a good video-based fall detection system, a combination of different techniques will be needed.