Breath Monitoring by Thermal Vision

In this paper, we propose a method to monitor breathing rate using two features, temporal feature and spatial feature. Temporal feature is obtained by the periodical change of temperature of the nostrils, and spatial feature is obtained between wing of the nose and around it. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed by testees breathing with a metronome. As a result, the difference between the frequency of the metronome and the frequency obtained by the proposed method is less than 0.01 Hz, and it was confirmed that the breathing rate can be estimated from the temperature image without contact with testees.