A Vision-Based Approach to Early Detection of Drowning Incidents in Swimming Pools
Wei-Lwun Lu, Yuanzheng Paul Tan · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology · 2004
We present in this paper a vision-based approach to detection of drowning incidents in swimming pools at the earliest possible stage. The proposed approach consists of two main parts: a vision component which can reliably detect and track swimmers in spite of large scene variations of monitored pool areas, and an event-inference module which parses observation sequences of swimmer features for possible drowning behavioral signs. The vision component employs a model-based approach to represent and differentiate the background pool areas and foreground swimmers. The event-inference module is constructed based on a finite state machine, which integrates several reasoning rules formulated from universal motion characteristics of drowning swimmers. Possible drowning incidents are quickly detected using a sequential change detection algorithm. We have applied the proposed approach to a number of video clips of simulated drowning and obtained promising results as reported in this paper.