Face Tracking and Respiratory Signal Analysis for the Detection of Sleep Apnea in Thermal Infrared Videos with Head Movement

摘要

Infrared Thermography as imaging modality has gained increased attention over the last years. Its main advantages in human action monitoring are illumination invariance and its ability to monitor physiological parameters such as heart and respiratory rates. In our work, we present a novel approach for detecting respiratory-related data, in our case apnea events, from thermal infrared recordings. In contrast to already published methods where the subjects were required not to move, our approach uses state-of-the-art thermal face tracking technology to allow monitoring of subjects showing head movement, which is an important aspect for real-world applications. We implement different methods for apnea detection and face tracking and test them on videos of different subjects against a ground truth acquired with an established breathing rate monitoring system. Results show that our proposed approach allows robust apnea detection with moving subjects. Our methods allow using already presented or novel vital sign monitoring systems under conditions where the monitored persons are note required to keep their heads in a given position.