A Robust Camera-based Method for Breath Rate Measurement
This provides a more accurate and movement-resistant way to remotely monitor breath rate using cheap cameras, addressing a specific domain need in health monitoring.
The study tackled the problem of measuring human breath rate from video footage by proposing a robust method that achieves a relative deviation from ground truth of less than 5% and an average mean absolute error of 0.57 respirations per minute, tested on over 2.5 hours of video from 14 volunteers.
Proliferation of cheap and accessible cameras makes it possible to measure a subject's breath rate from video footage alone. Recent works on this topic have proposed a variety of approaches for accurately measuring human breath rate, however they are either tested in near-ideal conditions, or produce results that are not sufficiently accurate. The present study proposes a more robust method to measure breath rate in humans with minimal hardware requirements using a combination of mathematical transforms with a relative deviation from the ground truth of less than 5%. The method was tested on videos taken from 14 volunteers with a total duration of over 2 hours 30 minutes. The obtained results were compared to reference data and the average mean absolute error was found to be at 0.57 respirations per minute, which is noticeably better than the results from previous works. The breath rate measurement method proposed in the present article is more resistant to distortions caused by subject movement and thus allows one to remotely measure the subject's breath rate without any significant limitations on the subject's behavior.