Visual Context-Aware Person Fall Detection

TL;DR

This paper investigates how visual context influences fall detection accuracy in images, demonstrating that background object transformations improve model robustness and reduce false alarms in healthcare applications.

Contribution

It introduces a segmentation pipeline and evaluates the impact of background transformations on fall detection models, highlighting the importance of visual context in classification.

Findings

Gaussian blur on backgrounds improves model performance

Object-specific transformations reduce false positives

Saliency maps confirm the importance of visual context

Abstract

As the global population ages, the number of fall-related incidents is on the rise. Effective fall detection systems, specifically in healthcare sector, are crucial to mitigate the risks associated with such events. This study evaluates the role of visual context, including background objects, on the accuracy of fall detection classifiers. We present a segmentation pipeline to semi-automatically separate individuals and objects in images. Well-established models like ResNet-18, EfficientNetV2-S, and Swin-Small are trained and evaluated. During training, pixel-based transformations are applied to segmented objects, and the models are then evaluated on raw images without segmentation. Our findings highlight the significant influence of visual context on fall detection. The application of Gaussian blur to the image background notably improves the performance and generalization capabilities of all models. Background objects such as beds, chairs, or wheelchairs can challenge fall detection systems, leading to false positive alarms. However, we demonstrate that object-specific contextual transformations during training effectively mitigate this challenge. Further analysis using saliency maps supports our observation that visual context is crucial in classification tasks. We create both dataset processing API and segmentation pipeline, available at https://github.com/A-NGJ/image-segmentation-cli.