Integrating attention mechanism and multi-scale feature extraction for fall detection

Addressing the critical need for accurate fall event detection due to their potentially severe impacts, this paper introduces the Spatial Channel and Pooling Enhanced You Only Look Once version 5 small (SCPE-YOLOv5s) model. Fall events pose a challenge for detection due to their varying scales and subtle pose features. To address this problem, SCPE-YOLOv5s introduces spatial attention to the Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) network, which significantly enhances the model's ability to extract features from spatial pose distribution. Moreover, the model integrates average pooling layers into the Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) network to support the multi-scale extraction of fall poses. Meanwhile, by incorporating the ECA network into SPP, the model effectively combines global and local features to further enhance the feature extraction. This paper validates the SCPE-YOLOv5s on a public dataset, demonstrating that it achieves a mean Average Precision of 88.29 %, outperforming the You Only Look Once version 5 small by 4.87 %. Additionally, the model achieves 57.4 frames per second. Therefore, SCPE-YOLOv5s provides a novel solution for fall event detection.