A Two-Stage Fall Recognition Algorithm Based on Human Posture Features

Falls are seriously threatening the health of elderly. In order to reduce the potential danger caused by falls, this paper proposes a two-stage fall recognition algorithm based on human posture features. For preprocessing, we construct the new key features: deflection angles and spine ratio to describe the changes of human posture based on the human skeleton extracted by OpenPose. In the first stage, based on the variables: tendency symbol and steady symbol integrated by the scattered key features, we divide the human body state into three states: stable state, fluctuating state, and disordered state. By analyzing whether the body is in a stable state, the ADL (activities of daily living) actions with high stability can be preliminarily excluded. In the second stage: to further identify the confusing ADL actions and the fall actions, we innovatively design a time-continuous recognition algorithm. When human body is constantly in an unstable state, the human posture features: compare value γ, energy value ε, state score τ are proposed to form a feature vector, and support vector machine (SVM), K nearest neighbors (KNN), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF) are utilized for classification. Experiment results demonstrate that SVM with linear kernel function can distinguish falling actions best and our approach achieved a detection accuracy of 97.34%, precision of 98.50%, and the recall, F1 score are 97.33%, 97.91% respectively. Compared with previous state-of-art algorithms, our algorithm can achieve the highest recognition accuracy. It proves that our fall detection method is effective.