Fast prototyping of a SoC-based smart-camera: a real-time fall detection case study

Smart camera, i.e. cameras that are able to acquire and process images in real-time, is a typical example of the new embedded computer vision systems. A key example of application is automatic fall detection, which can be useful for helping elderly people in daily life. In this paper, we propose a methodology for development and fast-prototyping of a fall detection system based on such a smart camera, which allows to reduce the development time compared to standard approaches. Founded on a supervised classification approach, we propose a HW/SW implementation to detect falls in a home environment using a single camera and an optimized descriptor adapted to real-time tasks. This heterogeneous implementation is based on Xilinx's system-on-chip named Zynq. The main contributions of this work are (i) the proposal of a co-design methodology. These methodologies enable the HW/SW partitioning to be delayed using high-level algorithmic description and high-level synthesis tools. Our approach enables fast prototyping which allows fast architecture exploration and optimisation to be performed, (ii) the design of a hardware accelerator dedicated to boosting-based classification, which is a very popular and efficient algorithm used in image analysis, (iii) the proposal of fall-detection embedded in a smart camera and enabling integration into the elderly people environment. Performances of our system are finally compared to the state-of-the-art.