Automatic Fall Detection Using Membership Based Histogram Descriptors

We propose a framework for automatic fall detection based on video visual feature extraction. The proposed approach relies on a membership histogram descriptor that encodes the visual properties of the video frames. This descriptor is obtained by mapping the original low-level visual features to a more discriminative descriptor using possibilistic memberships. This mapping can be summarized in two main phases. The first one consists in categorizing the low-level visual features of the video frames and generating homogeneous clusters in an unsupervised way. The second phase uses the obtained membership degrees generated by the clustering process to compute the membership based histogram descriptor (MHD). For the testing stage, the proposed fall detection approach categorizes unlabeled videos as "Fall" or "Non-Fall" scene using a possibilistic K-nearest neighbors classifier. The proposed approach is assessed using standard videos dataset that simulates patient fall. Also, we compare its performance with that of state-of-the-art fall detection techniques.