In recent years, the research on the anomaly detection has been rapidly increasing. The researchers were worked on different anomalies in videos. This work focuses on fall as an anomaly as it is an emerging research topic with application in elderly safety areas including home environment. The older population staying alone at home is prone to various accidental events including falls which may lead to multiple harmful consequences even death. Thus, it is imperative to develop a robust solution to avoid this problem. This can be done with the help of video surveillance along with computer vision. In this paper, a simple yet efficient technique to detect fall with the help of inexpensive depth camera was presented. Frame differencing method was applied for background subtraction. Various features including orientation angle, aspect ratio, silhouette features, and motion history image (MHI) were extracted for fall characterization. The training and testing were successfully implemented using SVM and SGD classifiers. It was observed that SGD classifier gives better fall detection accuracy than the SVM classifier in both training and testing phase for SDU fall dataset. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.