Bipedal region segmentation algorithm for infrared thermography based on relative temperature difference

When infrared thermography is applied to the early diagnosis of diabetic foot, it is possible that there is a small temperature difference between the plantar region and the background region, which cannot segment the foot effectively. When the contrast between the plantar region and the background is good, the threshold method, edge-based method, and watershed method are easier to obtain good segmentation results. However, at the same time, when the room temperature and plantar temperature are relatively close, their image contrast is poor. In order to solve the segmentation problem in the case of poor contrast of medical images of diabetic foot, this study defines the relative temperature difference and proposes a method to achieve segmentation of bipedal regions in active infrared thermogram sequences based on the relative temperature difference. The experimental results show that this method can achieve high accuracy segmentation for heat maps with poor contrast.