Thermal Image Processing for Respiratory Estimation from Cubical Data with Expandable Depth

As healthcare costs continue to rise, finding affordable and non-invasive ways to monitor vital signs is increasingly important. One of the key metrics for assessing overall health and identifying potential issues early on is respiratory rate (RR). Most of the existing methods require multiple steps that consist of image and signal processing. This might be difficult to deploy on edge devices that often do not have specialized digital signal processors (DSP). Therefore, the goal of this study is to develop a single neural network realizing the entire process of RR estimation in a single forward pass. The proposed solution builds on recent advances in video recognition, capturing both spatial and temporal information in a multi-path network. Both paths process the data at different sampling rates to capture rapid and slow changes that are associated with differences in the temperature of the nostril area during the breathing episodes. The preliminary results show that the introduced end-to-end solution achieves better performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, without requiring additional pre/post-processing steps and signal-processing techniques. In addition, the presented results demonstrate its robustness on low-resolution thermal video sequences that are often used at the embedded edge due to the size and power constraints of such systems. Taking that into account, the proposed approach has the potential for efficient and convenient respiratory rate estimation across various markets in solutions deployed locally, close to end users.