A Survey on Radar-Based Fall Detection

Fall detection, particularly critical for high-risk demographics like the elderly, is a key public health concern where timely detection can greatly minimize harm. With the advancements in radio frequency technology, radar has emerged as a powerful tool for human detection and tracking. Traditional machine learning algorithms, such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), have shown promising outcomes. However, deep learning approaches, notably Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), have outperformed in learning intricate features and managing large, unstructured datasets. This survey offers an in-depth analysis of radar-based fall detection, with emphasis on Micro-Doppler, Range-Doppler, and Range-Doppler-Angles techniques. We discuss the intricacies and challenges in fall detection and emphasize the necessity for a clear definition of falls and appropriate detection criteria, informed by diverse influencing factors. We present an overview of radar signal processing principles and the underlying technology of radar-based fall detection, providing an accessible insight into machine learning and deep learning algorithms. After examining 74 research articles on radar-based fall detection published since 2000, we aim to bridge current research gaps and underscore the potential future research strategies, emphasizing the real-world applications possibility and the unexplored potential of deep learning in improving radar-based fall detection.

Online Targetless Radar-Camera Extrinsic Calibration Based on the Common Features of Radar and Camera

Sensor fusion is essential for autonomous driving and autonomous robots, and radar-camera fusion systems have gained popularity due to their complementary sensing capabilities. However, accurate calibration between these two sensors is crucial to ensure effective fusion and improve overall system performance. Calibration involves intrinsic and extrinsic calibration, with the latter being particularly important for achieving accurate sensor fusion. Unfortunately, many target-based calibration methods require complex operating procedures and well-designed experimental conditions, posing challenges for researchers attempting to reproduce the results. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach that leverages deep learning to extract a common feature from raw radar data (i.e., Range-Doppler-Angle data) and camera images. Instead of explicitly representing these common features, our method implicitly utilizes these common features to match identical objects from both data sources. Specifically, the extracted common feature serves as an example to demonstrate an online targetless calibration method between the radar and camera systems. The estimation of the extrinsic transformation matrix is achieved through this feature-based approach. To enhance the accuracy and robustness of the calibration, we apply the RANSAC and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) nonlinear optimization algorithm for deriving the matrix. Our experiments in the real world demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed method.

3D Radar and Camera Co-Calibration: A Flexible and Accurate Method for Target-based Extrinsic Calibration

Advances in autonomous driving are inseparable from sensor fusion. Heterogeneous sensors are widely used for sensor fusion due to their complementary properties, with radar and camera being the most equipped sensors. Intrinsic and extrinsic calibration are essential steps in sensor fusion. The extrinsic calibration, independent of the sensor's own parameters, and performed after the sensors are installed, greatly determines the accuracy of sensor fusion. Many target-based methods require cumbersome operating procedures and well-designed experimental conditions, making them extremely challenging. To this end, we propose a flexible, easy-to-reproduce and accurate method for extrinsic calibration of 3D radar and camera. The proposed method does not require a specially designed calibration environment, and instead places a single corner reflector (CR) on the ground to iteratively collect radar and camera data simultaneously using Robot Operating System (ROS), and obtain radar-camera point correspondences based on their timestamps, and then use these point correspondences as input to solve the perspective-n-point (PnP) problem, and finally get the extrinsic calibration matrix. Also, RANSAC is used for robustness and the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) nonlinear optimization algorithm is used for accuracy. Multiple controlled environment experiments as well as real-world experiments demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy (AED error is 15.31 pixels and Acc up to 89\%) of the proposed method.

mmPose-NLP: A Natural Language Processing Approach to Precise Skeletal Pose Estimation using mmWave Radars

In this paper we presented mmPose-NLP, a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) inspired Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) skeletal key-point estimator using millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar data. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first method to precisely estimate upto 25 skeletal key-points using mmWave radar data alone. Skeletal pose estimation is critical in several applications ranging from autonomous vehicles, traffic monitoring, patient monitoring, gait analysis, to defense security forensics, and aid both preventative and actionable decision making. The use of mmWave radars for this task, over traditionally employed optical sensors, provide several advantages, primarily its operational robustness to scene lighting and adverse weather conditions, where optical sensor performance degrade significantly. The mmWave radar point-cloud (PCL) data is first voxelized (analogous to tokenization in NLP) and $N$ frames of the voxelized radar data (analogous to a text paragraph in NLP) is subjected to the proposed mmPose-NLP architecture, where the voxel indices of the 25 skeletal key-points (analogous to keyword extraction in NLP) are predicted. The voxel indices are converted back to real world 3-D coordinates using the voxel dictionary used during the tokenization process. Mean Absolute Error (MAE) metrics were used to measure the accuracy of the proposed system against the ground truth, with the proposed mmPose-NLP offering <3 cm localization errors in the depth, horizontal and vertical axes. The effect of the number of input frames vs performance/accuracy was also studied for N = {1,2,..,10}. A comprehensive methodology, results, discussions and limitations are presented in this paper. All the source codes and results are made available on GitHub for furthering research and development in this critical yet emerging domain of skeletal key-point estimation using mmWave radars.

mmFall: Fall Detection using 4D MmWave Radar and Variational Recurrent Autoencoder

In this paper we propose mmFall - a novel fall detection system, which comprises of (i) the emerging millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar sensor to collect the human body's point cloud along with the body centroid, and (ii) a variational recurrent autoencoder (VRAE) to compute the anomaly level of the body motion based on the acquired point cloud. A fall is claimed to have occurred when the spike in anomaly level and the drop in centroid height occur simultaneously. The mmWave radar sensor provides several advantages, such as privacycompliance and high-sensitivity to motion, over the traditional sensing modalities. However, (i) randomness in radar point cloud data and (ii) difficulties in fall collection/labeling in the traditional supervised fall detection approaches are the two main challenges. To overcome the randomness in radar data, the proposed VRAE uses variational inference, a probabilistic approach rather than the traditional deterministic approach, to infer the posterior probability of the body's latent motion state at each frame, followed by a recurrent neural network (RNN) to learn the temporal features of the motion over multiple frames. Moreover, to circumvent the difficulties in fall data collection/labeling, the VRAE is built upon an autoencoder architecture in a semi-supervised approach, and trained on only normal activities of daily living (ADL) such that in the inference stage the VRAE will generate a spike in the anomaly level once an abnormal motion, such as fall, occurs. During the experiment, we implemented the VRAE along with two other baselines, and tested on the dataset collected in an apartment. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve indicates that our proposed model outperforms the other two baselines, and achieves 98% detection out of 50 falls at the expense of just 2 false alarms.