Pyramidal Lucas—Kanade-Based Noncontact Breath Motion Detection

This paper aims to build a simple and low-cost system by using images to detect human breath in a real-time fashion to estimate the peak of the inspiratory phase of a breath so as to define a proper triggering timing for X-ray shooting. In fact, it is very difficult to detect very small breathing motion on images. In this paper, well-known techniques are employed to obtain useful features from the chest area for the Lucas-Kanade algorithm. Various levels of the Pyramidal Lucas-Kanade are then adapted to track possible small motions of those features. The proposed approach can successfully detect the inspiratory-expiratory motions and the peak time of inspiratory phase can be predicted within an acceptable interval of error time. From the experiments conducted, the breath motion can be successfully observed in two different environment situations (dim-lighting and lighting conditions). It can be found that the tracked features are quite robust and stable without losing the quantity over a long period of testing time. Thus, the proposed approach can effectively be used to define a proper triggering timing for X-ray shooting. Besides, in our experiments, even though the target is 6 m away, the breath detection is still successful. In other words, the proposed approach can also be used for surveillance or healthcare environments.