Radar fall detectors: a comparison

Falls are a major cause of accidents in elderly people. Even simple falls can lead to severe injuries, and sometimes result in death. Doppler fall detection has drawn much attention in recent years. Micro-Doppler signatures play an important role for the Doppler-based radar systems. Numerous studies have demonstrated the offerings of micro-Doppler characteristics for fall detection. In this respect, a plethora of micro-Doppler signature features have been proposed, including those stemming from speech recognition and wavelet decomposition. In this work, we consider four different sets of features for fall detection. These can be categorized as spectrogram based features, wavelet based features, mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients, and power burst curve features. Support vector machine is employed as the classifier. Performance of the respective fall detectors is investigated using real data obtained with the same radar operating resources and under identical sensing conditions. For the considered data, the spectrogram based feature set is shown to provide superior fall detection performance.