Falling is among the most damaging event elderly people may experience. With the ever-growing aging population, there is an urgent need for the development of fall detection systems. Thanks to the rapid development of sensor networks and the Internet of Things (IoT), human-computer interaction using sensor fusion has been regarded as an effective method to address the problem of fall detection. In this paper, we provide a literature survey of work conducted on elderly fall detection using sensor networks and IoT. Although there are various existing studies which focus on the fall detection with individual sensors, such as wearable ones and depth cameras, the performance of these systems are still not satisfying as they suffer mostly from high false alarms. Literature shows that fusing the signals of different sensors could result in higher accuracy and lower false alarms, while improving the robustness of such systems. We approach this survey from different perspectives, including data collection, data transmission, sensor fusion, data analysis, security, and privacy. We also review the benchmark data sets available that have been used to quantify the performance of the proposed methods. The survey is meant to provide researchers in the field of elderly fall detection using sensor networks with a summary of progress achieved up to date and to identify areas where further effort would be beneficial.

Background: Keypoint detection is important for many computer vision applications. Existing methods suffer from insufficient selectivity regarding the shape properties of features and are vulnerable to contrast variations and to the presence of noise or texture. Methods: We propose a trainable filter which we call Combination Of Shifted FIlter REsponses (COSFIRE) and use for keypoint detection and pattern recognition. It is automatically configured to be selective for a local contour pattern specified by an example. The configuration comprises selecting given channels of a bank of Gabor filters and determining certain blur and shift parameters. A COSFIRE filter response is computed as the weighted geometric mean of the blurred and shifted responses of the selected Gabor filters. It shares similar properties with some shape-selective neurons in visual cortex, which provided inspiration for this work. Results: We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filters in three applications: the detection of retinal vascular bifurcations (DRIVE dataset: 98.50 percent recall, 96.09 percent precision), the recognition of handwritten digits (MNIST dataset: 99.48 percent correct classification), and the detection and recognition of traffic signs in complex scenes (100 percent recall and precision). Conclusions: The proposed COSFIRE filters are conceptually simple and easy to implement. They are versatile keypoint detectors and are highly effective in practical computer vision applications.

Simple cells in primary visual cortex are believed to extract local contour information from a visual scene. The 2D Gabor function (GF) model has gained particular popularity as a computational model of a simple cell. However, it short-cuts the LGN, it cannot reproduce a number of properties of real simple cells, and its effectiveness in contour detection tasks has never been compared with the effectiveness of alternative models. We propose a computational model that uses as afferent inputs the responses of model LGN cells with center–surround receptive fields (RFs) and we refer to it as a Combination of Receptive Fields (CORF) model. We use shifted gratings as test stimuli and simulated reverse correlation to explore the nature of the proposed model. We study its behavior regarding the effect of contrast on its response and orientation bandwidth as well as the effect of an orthogonal mask on the response to an optimally oriented stimulus. We also evaluate and compare the performances of the CORF and GF models regarding contour detection, using two public data sets of images of natural scenes with associated contour ground truths. The RF map of the proposed CORF model, determined with simulated reverse correlation, can be divided in elongated excitatory and inhibitory regions typical of simple cells. The modulated response to shifted gratings that this model shows is also characteristic of a simple cell. Furthermore, the CORF model exhibits cross orientation suppression, contrast invariant orientation tuning and response saturation. These properties are observed in real simple cells, but are not possessed by the GF model. The proposed CORF model outperforms the GF model in contour detection with high statistical confidence (RuG data set: p < 10⁻⁴, and Berkeley data set: p < 10⁻⁴). The proposed CORF model is more realistic than the GF model and is more effective in contour detection, which is assumed to be the primary biological role of simple cells.