Abstract
Human falls, especially for elderly people, can cause serious injuries that might lead to permanent disability. Approximately 20–30% of the aged people in the United States who experienced fall accidents suffer from head trauma, injuries, or bruises. Fall detection is becoming an important public healthcare problem. Timely and accurate fall incident detection could enable the instant delivery of medical services to the injured. New advances in vision-based technologies, including deep learning, have shown significant results in action recognition, where some focus on the detection of fall actions. In this paper, we propose an automatic human fall detection system using multi-stream convolutional neural networks with fusion. The system is based on a multi-level image-fusion approach of every 16 frames of an input video to highlight movement differences within this range. This results of four consecutive preprocessed images are fed to a new proposed and efficient lightweight multi-stream CNN model that is based on a four-branch architecture (4S-3DCNN) that classifies whether there is an incident of a human fall. The evaluation included the use of more than 6392 generated sequences from the Le2i fall detection dataset, which is a publicly available fall video dataset. The proposed method, using three-fold cross-validation to validate generalization and susceptibility to overfitting, achieved a 99.03%, 99.00%, 99.68%, and 99.00% accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision, respectively. The experimental results prove that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models, including GoogleNet, SqueezeNet, ResNet18, and DarkNet19, for fall incident detection.