Virtual reality in training artificial intelligence-based systems: a case study of fall detection

Artificial Intelligent (AI) systems generally require training data of sufficient quantity and appropriate quality to perform efficiently. However, in many areas, such training data is simply not available or incredibly difficult to acquire. The recent developments in Virtual Reality (VR) have opened a new door for addressing this issue. This paper demonstrates the use of VR for generating training data for AI systems through a case study of human fall detection. Fall detection is a challenging problem in the public healthcare domain. Despite significant efforts devoted to introducing reliable and effective fall detection algorithms and enormous devices developed in the literature, minimal success has been achieved. The lack of recorded fall data and the data quality have been identified as major obstacles. To address this issue, this paper proposes an innovative approach to remove the afformentioned obstacle using VR technology. In this approach, a framework is, first, proposed to generate human fall data in virtual environments. The generated fall data is then tested with state-of-the-art visual-based fall detection algorithms to gauge its effectiveness. The results have indicated that the virtual human fall data generated using the proposed framework have sufficient quality to improve fall detection algorithms. Although the approach is proposed and verified in the context of human fall detection, it is applicable to other computer vision problems in different contexts, including human motion detection/recognition and self-driving vehicles.