A Robust Camera-based Method for Breath Rate Measurement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust camera-based method for measuring human breath rate from video footage, achieving high accuracy and resistance to movement distortions with minimal hardware.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining mathematical transforms that significantly improves accuracy and robustness over previous methods in breath rate measurement from videos.

Findings

Average mean absolute error of 0.57 respirations per minute

Less than 5% deviation from ground truth

Effective in real-world, movement-affected conditions

Abstract

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.