Real-time vision based respiration monitoring system

Respiration rate is an important indicator of an individual´s health. Existing respiration monitoring systems are usually contact based, and so the sensing device is attached to the subject´s body. This creates discomfort to the patient and can interfere with normal breathing. This paper presents a vision based contactless method of monitoring respiration rate. The method involves image and signal processing techniques to extract chest and abdominal movements´ information from a sequence of video images recorded using a single video camera. The system provided a real-time respiration monitoring information consisting of a plot of respiration signal and the value of respiration rate. The respiration data could also be stored to allow for off-line analysis to be performed. A caparison of the developed method against a number of contact-based respiration monitoring systems confirmed its effectiveness. The system is currently being further developed to make its operation more robust.