Landmark detection for wearable home care ambient assisted living system

The importance of developing ambient assisted living technologies (AALT), intended to monitor elderly person activity in their home environment, increases in recent years. Among many approaches, systems based on the optical observation have became popular. Consequently, there is a need of developing robust and fast video analysis platforms and algorithms. In this paper, we propose the use of wearable cameras to monitor the daily activities of the elderly. The novelty of our approach is to analyze gathered data in real-time on wearable platform (without the need of storing video data) and consequently minimize privacy issues. We focus on the person localization in indoor environment, using natural landmark images taken whilst walking inside building during calibration procedure. The hypothesis that wearable video surveillance systems can be used to infer location (and thus detect and monitor the activity of an elderly person) has been confirmed by preliminary tests and results. However, still there are many issues to be solved and therefore further research and development of the proposed solution is planned.