A Lightweight Subgraph-Based Deep Learning Approach for Fall Recognition

Falls pose a great danger to social development, especially to the elderly population. When a fall occurs, the body’s center of gravity moves from a high position to a low position, and the magnitude of change varies among body parts. Most existing fall recognition methods based on deep learning have not yet considered the differences between the movement and the change in amplitude of each body part. Besides, some problems exist such as complicated design, slow detection speed, and lack of timeliness. To alleviate these problems, a lightweight subgraph-based deep learning method utilizing skeleton information for fall recognition is proposed in this paper. The skeleton information of the human body is extracted by OpenPose, and an end-to-end lightweight subgraph-based network is designed. Sub-graph division and sub-graph attention modules are introduced to add a larger perceptual field while maintaining its lightweight characteristics. A multi-scale temporal convolution module is also designed to extract and fuse multi-scale temporal features, which enriches the feature representation. The proposed method is evaluated on a partial fall dataset collected in NTU and on two public datasets, and outperforms existing methods. It indicates that the proposed method is accurate and lightweight, which means it is suitable for real-time detection and rapid response to falls.