Detecting Human Falls in Poor Lighting: Object Detection and Tracking Approach for Indoor Safety

Falls are one the leading causes of accidental death for all people, but the elderly are at particularly high risk. Falls are severe issue in the care of those elderly people who live alone and have limited access to health aides and skilled nursing care. Conventional vision-based systems for fall detection are prone to failure in conditions with low illumination. Therefore, an automated system that detects falls in low-light conditions has become an urgent need for protecting vulnerable people. This paper proposes a novel vision-based fall detection system that uses object tracking and image enhancement techniques. The proposed approach is divided into two parts. First, the captured frames are optimized using a dual illumination estimation algorithm. Next, a deep-learning-based tracking framework that includes detection by YOLOv7 and tracking by the Deep SORT algorithm is proposed to perform fall detection. On the Le2i fall and UR fall detection (URFD) datasets, we evaluate the proposed method and demonstrate the effectiveness of fall detection in dark night environments with obstacles.