Real-time contactless monitoring of respiration rate and heart rate based on thermal imaging technology

Human temperature characteristics are closely related to physiological activities such as respiration and heart rate. For daily healthcare needs, a real-time contactless monitoring of respiration rate and heart rate based on facial thermal imaging was proposed. A RetinaFace framework was applied to detect the facial region from the video frames of thermal imaging. The facial region was divided equally into 12 areas. For the detection of respiratory rate, the respiratory signal is obtained by detecting the nose area and the feature tracking recognition method based on the optical flow field method. For the heart rate detection, an independent component analysis (ICA) was performed on the 12 areas. The heart rate was calculated based on the region with the higher proportion of energy according to the ICA. Experimental results showed that real-time contactless monitoring system proposed in this study can accurately detect the respiratory rate and heart rate, which may facilitate the daily healthcare examination for a large population.