Transfer Learning for Keypoint Detection in Low-Resolution Thermal TUG Test Images
This work addresses mobility assessment in clinical settings using thermal imaging, introducing a new paradigm but with incremental technical improvements.
The study tackled human keypoint detection in low-resolution thermal images for the Timed Up and Go test, achieving AP scores of 0.861, 0.942, and 0.887, which outperformed traditional methods like Mask R-CNN and ViTPose-Base.
This study presents a novel approach to human keypoint detection in low-resolution thermal images using transfer learning techniques. We introduce the first application of the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test in thermal image computer vision, establishing a new paradigm for mobility assessment. Our method leverages a MobileNetV3-Small encoder and a ViTPose decoder, trained using a composite loss function that balances latent representation alignment and heatmap accuracy. The model was evaluated using the Object Keypoint Similarity (OKS) metric from the COCO Keypoint Detection Challenge. The proposed model achieves better performance with AP, AP50, and AP75 scores of 0.861, 0.942, and 0.887 respectively, outperforming traditional supervised learning approaches like Mask R-CNN and ViTPose-Base. Moreover, our model demonstrates superior computational efficiency in terms of parameter count and FLOPS. This research lays a solid foundation for future clinical applications of thermal imaging in mobility assessment and rehabilitation monitoring.