Abstract
The detection of accidents on elderly person living alone and the communication between the elderly person and his/her family are very important. This paper describes a new method for tracking and fall detection of elderly person using omni-directional image sensor, and the Itawari-kan communication system that supports their communications and gives alarms for detected accidents on the elderly person. This system tracks the person's head position in real-time by image processing on images captured by some omni-directional image sensor. Then, the system transmits the information of the detected head position to another site. The computer of recipient site generates the computer graphics animation of the tracked person and displays the animation on a monitor. When the system detects an accident from the head position, the system gives an alarm. This method reduces traffic on network and keeps the privacy for the tracked person. We made a prototype system of the Itawari-kan communication system. Experiments on the system showed good feasibility of the proposed system.
