Demo Abstract: An Underwater Sonar-Based Drowning Detection System

Drowning is a major cause of unintentional deaths in swimming pools. Most swimming pools hire lifeguards for continuous surveil-lance, which is labor-intensive and hence unfeasible for small private pools. The existing unmanned surveillance solutions like camera array requires non-trivial installations, only work in certain conditions (e.g., with adequate ambient lighting), or raise privacy concerns. This demo presents SwimSonar, the first practical drowning detection system based on underwater sonar. SwimSonar employs an active ultrasonic sonar and features a novel sonar scanning strategy that balances the time and accuracy. Lastly, SwimSonar leverages a deep neural network for accurate drowning detection. Our experiments in real swimming pools show that the system achieves 88 % classification accuracy with a scan time of 1.5 seconds.