Thermal Imaging for Contactless Cardiorespiratory and Sudomotor Response Monitoring

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Casado, Constantino Álvarez, Rahman, Mohammad, Sharifipour, Sasan, Nguyen, Nhi, Cañellas, Manuel Lage, Wu, Xiaoting, López, Miguel Bordallo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866909011047088128
author Casado, Constantino Álvarez
Rahman, Mohammad
Sharifipour, Sasan
Nguyen, Nhi
Cañellas, Manuel Lage
Wu, Xiaoting
López, Miguel Bordallo
author_facet Casado, Constantino Álvarez
Rahman, Mohammad
Sharifipour, Sasan
Nguyen, Nhi
Cañellas, Manuel Lage
Wu, Xiaoting
López, Miguel Bordallo
contents Human-machine interfaces in industrial automation need sensing modules that monitor operator actions and physiological state. This is important in factories, vehicles, machinery cabins, and human-robot collaboration, where workload, stress, fatigue, or reduced attention can affect safety. RGB monitoring is limited by low light, shadows, and privacy concerns, while thermal infrared imaging captures skin temperature dynamics without visible illumination. This paper studies thermal video as a contactless computer vision modality for estimating electrodermal activity (EDA), heart rate (HR), and breathing rate (BR), with the goal of supporting adaptive human-machine interfaces and operator-state awareness. We propose a signal-processing pipeline that tracks facial regions, aggregates thermal signals, and separates slow sudomotor trends from faster cardiorespiratory components. HR is estimated using orthogonal matrix image transformation (OMIT) across multiple facial regions, while BR is estimated from nasal and cheek thermal signals using spectral peak detection. We characterize 288 ROI-method configurations against contact references with lag-tolerant metrics using 31 sessions from the public SIMULATOR STUDY 1 (SIM1) driver monitoring dataset. The best fixed EDA configuration reaches a mean absolute correlation of $0.40 \pm 0.23$ against palm EDA, with individual sessions reaching $0.89$. BR estimation achieves $3.1 \pm 1.1$\,bpm mean absolute error, while HR estimation yields $13.8 \pm 7.5$\,bpm MAE, limited by the $7.5$\,Hz thermal camera frame rate. The results show that thermal video provides useful respiratory and sudomotor cues, while revealing limitations caused by ROI selection, polarity changes, latency, and subject variability. These findings provide baseline design guidance for thermal computer vision as an auxiliary sensing layer in adaptive industrial HMI systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_12361
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Thermal Imaging for Contactless Cardiorespiratory and Sudomotor Response Monitoring
Casado, Constantino Álvarez
Rahman, Mohammad
Sharifipour, Sasan
Nguyen, Nhi
Cañellas, Manuel Lage
Wu, Xiaoting
López, Miguel Bordallo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human-machine interfaces in industrial automation need sensing modules that monitor operator actions and physiological state. This is important in factories, vehicles, machinery cabins, and human-robot collaboration, where workload, stress, fatigue, or reduced attention can affect safety. RGB monitoring is limited by low light, shadows, and privacy concerns, while thermal infrared imaging captures skin temperature dynamics without visible illumination. This paper studies thermal video as a contactless computer vision modality for estimating electrodermal activity (EDA), heart rate (HR), and breathing rate (BR), with the goal of supporting adaptive human-machine interfaces and operator-state awareness. We propose a signal-processing pipeline that tracks facial regions, aggregates thermal signals, and separates slow sudomotor trends from faster cardiorespiratory components. HR is estimated using orthogonal matrix image transformation (OMIT) across multiple facial regions, while BR is estimated from nasal and cheek thermal signals using spectral peak detection. We characterize 288 ROI-method configurations against contact references with lag-tolerant metrics using 31 sessions from the public SIMULATOR STUDY 1 (SIM1) driver monitoring dataset. The best fixed EDA configuration reaches a mean absolute correlation of $0.40 \pm 0.23$ against palm EDA, with individual sessions reaching $0.89$. BR estimation achieves $3.1 \pm 1.1$\,bpm mean absolute error, while HR estimation yields $13.8 \pm 7.5$\,bpm MAE, limited by the $7.5$\,Hz thermal camera frame rate. The results show that thermal video provides useful respiratory and sudomotor cues, while revealing limitations caused by ROI selection, polarity changes, latency, and subject variability. These findings provide baseline design guidance for thermal computer vision as an auxiliary sensing layer in adaptive industrial HMI systems.
title Thermal Imaging for Contactless Cardiorespiratory and Sudomotor Response Monitoring
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12361