A novel action recognition system for smart monitoring of elderly people using Action Pattern Image and Series CNN with transfer learning

Falling of elderly people who are staying alone at home leads to health risks. If they are not attended immediately even it may lead to fatal danger to their life. In this paper a novel computer vision-based system for smart monitoring of elderly people using Series Convolutional Neural Network (SCNN) with transfer learning is proposed. When CNN is trained by the frames of the videos directly, it learns from all pixels including the background pixels. Generally, the background in a video does not contribute anything in identifying the action and actually it will mislead the action classification. So, we propose a novel action recognition system and our contributions are 1) to generate more general action patterns which are not affected by illumination and background variations of the video sequences and eliminate the obligation of image augmentation in CNN training 2) to design SCNN architecture and enhance the feature extraction process to learn large amount of data, 3) to present the patterns learnt by the neurons in the layers and analyze how these neurons capture the action when the input pattern is passing through these neurons, and 4) to extend the capability of the trained SCNN for recognizing fall actions using transfer learning.