Deep Learning for Fall Detection: 3D-CNN Combined with LSTM on Video Kinematic Data

Fall detection is an important public healthcare problem. Timely detection could enable instant delivery of medical service to the injured. A popular non-intrusive solution for fall detection is based on videos obtained through ambient camera, and the corresponding methods usually require a large dataset to train a classifier and are inclined to be influenced by the image quality. However, it is hard to collect fall data and instead simulated falls are recorded to construct the training dataset, which is restricted to limited quantity. To address these problems, a three-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D CNN) based method for fall detection is developed which only uses video kinematic data to train an automatic feature extractor and could circumvent the requirement for large fall dataset of deep learning solution. 2D CNN could only encode spatial information, and the employed 3D convolution could extract motion feature from temporal sequence, which is important for fall detection. To further locate the region of interest in each frame, a LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) based spatial visual attention scheme is incorporated. Sports dataset Sports-1M with no fall examples is employed to train the 3D CNN, which is then combined with LSTM to train a classifier with fall dataset. Experiments have verified the proposed scheme on fall detection benchmark with high accuracy as 100%. Superior performance has also been obtained on other activity databases.