Automated Vision-based Surveillance System to Detect Drowning Incidents in Swimming Pools

At present, swimming pools are built in hotels, sport clubs, schools and private residences. Although there have been various regulations put into place to reduce drowning accidents in some countries, communities still experience many drowning incidents. Accordingly, a real-time system that will track swimmers in a pool using machine learning techniques and prevents drowning accidents is proposed. The system consists of a Raspberry Pi with the Raspbian operating system, a Pixy camera, an Arduino Nano board, stepper motors, an alarm system, and motor drivers. The proposed system is based on the color-based algorithm to position and rescue swimmers who are drowning. The device then sends an alarm to the lifeguards. To verify the performance of the proposed system, a prototype has been developed, implemented, and tested. The results from experiments indicate that the system has a unique capability to monitor and track swimmers, thereby enabling it to mitigate and curb the number of deaths by drowning.