Application of adaptive block matching in the extraction of temporal motor activity signals from video recordings of neonatal seizures

The paper presents a procedure developed to extract quantitative information from video recordings of neonatal seizures in the form of temporal motor activity signals. The motor activity signals are extracted by tracking selected anatomical sites during the seizure using adaptive block matching. The motion of a block of pixels is quantified by searching for the most similar block of pixels in subsequent frames; this search is facilitated by employing various update strategies to account for the changing appearance of the block. Experiments indicate that the temporal motor activity signals extracted by the proposed procedure constitute an effective representation of videotaped clinical events and can be used for seizure recognition and characterization.