Camera based respiration rate of neonates by modeling movement of chest and abdomen region

Respiration Rate (RR) is one of the important parameters used for monitoring of neonates in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). In this paper, we propose a contactless method of measuring RR using a camera. Our algorithm exploits the motion of the chest and abdomen during the breathing cycle of a neonate. The chest and abdomen regions will typically expand and contract during inspiration and expiration phases respectively. We model this natural movement by capturing the motion of these regions using optical flow. The optical flow vectors converge and diverge during expiration and inspiration respectively and we capture this pattern by using a convergence and divergence filter. We use Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to separate the natural motion of the chest and abdomen from noise. To reduce the computational complexity, we use the convergence and divergence filter in Clifford Fourier Transform (CFT) of the vector field. We show the efficacy of our method by comparing the results with the ground truth RR collected from a patient monitor.