A Novel Approach for Fall Detection Using Thermal Imaging and a Stacking Ensemble of Autoencoder and 3D-CNN Models
Christopher Silver, Thangarajah Akilan · 2023
Falls are a significant cause of injury and mortality, particularly among the elderly population. Early detection of falls is crucial to mitigate their impact. Thermal imaging is a promising technology for detecting falls as it is non-invasive and operates in low-light conditions. However, accurately detecting falls in thermal images remains challenging due to the low resolution and lack of color information in these images. This paper proposes a novel approach for improving fall detection in thermal image data using a stacking ensemble of Autoencoder (AE) and 3-D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) models fed into a meta-neural network which is trained to detect falls and non-falls. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated through ablation studies on the publicly available benchmark dataset—"Thermal Simulated Fall", in which the model achieves an accuracy of 83%. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed solution outperforms an AE-based baseline by 9.2%. The combination of AEs and 3D-CNNs allows us to harness the power of both supervised and unsupervised learning methodologies, whilst mitigating the limitations and biases of each individual model, offering a promising solution for accurate and efficient fall detection in thermal image input streams.