Ali Al-Naji

Remote monitoring of cardiorespiratory signals from a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle

BackgroundRemote physiological measurement might be very useful for biomedical diagnostics and monitoring. This study presents an efficient method for remotely measuring heart rate and respiratory rate from video captured by a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle (UVA). The proposed method estimates heart rate and respiratory rate based on the acquired signals obtained from video-photoplethysmography that are synchronous with cardiorespiratory activity.MethodsSince the PPG signal is highly affected by the noise variations (illumination variations, subject’s motions and camera movement), we have used advanced signal processing techniques, including complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) and canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to remove noise under these assumptions.ResultsTo evaluate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method, a set of experiments were performed on 15 healthy volunteers in a front-facing position involving motion resulting from both the subject and the UAV under different scenarios and different lighting conditions.ConclusionThe experimental results demonstrated that the proposed system with and without the magnification process achieves robust and accurate readings and have significant correlations compared to a standard pulse oximeter and Piezo respiratory belt. Also, the squared correlation coefficient, root mean square error, and mean error rate yielded by the proposed method with and without the magnification process were significantly better than the state-of-the-art methodologies, including independent component analysis (ICA) and principal component analysis (PCA).

Monitoring of Cardiorespiratory Signal: Principles of Remote Measurements and Review of Methods

Physiological signs can be remotely observed from the physiological and physical effects caused by a cardiorespiratory activity. A wide range of research on remote cardiorespiratory monitoring systems has been done using different methods, including methods based on Doppler effect, thermal imaging, and video camera imaging. The aim of this paper was to review and compare the newest and most promising of such remote measuring methods, introducing their merits and limitations under different circumstances. In addition, this paper summarizes the performance of these methods in a table regarding the noise artifacts, subject movement, the number of regions of interest, generalization to multiple subjects, detection range (distance), biological effects, and cost. This is a thorough general overview of the remote measurement of cardiorespiratory methods.

Simultaneous Tracking of Cardiorespiratory Signals for Multiple Persons Using a Machine Vision System With Noise Artifact Removal

Most existing non-contact monitoring systems are limited to detecting physiological signs from a single subject at a time. Still, another challenge facing these systems is that they are prone to noise artifacts resulting from motion of subjects, facial expressions, talking, skin tone, and illumination variations. This paper proposes an efficient non-contact system based on a digital camera to track the cardiorespiratory signal from a number of subjects (up to six persons) at the same time with a new method for noise artifact removal. The proposed system relied on the physiological and physical effects as a result of the activity of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, such as skin color changes and head motion. Since these effects are imperceptible to the human eye and highly affected by the noise variations, we used advanced signal and video processing techniques, including developing video magnification technique, complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise, and canonical correlation analysis to extract the heart rate and respiratory rate from multiple subjects under the noise artifact assumptions. The experimental results of the proposed system had a significant correlation (Pearson’s correlation coefficient = 0.9994, Spearman correlation coefficient = 0.9987, and root mean square error = 0.32) when compared with the conventional contact methods (pulse oximeter and piezorespiratory belt), which makes the proposed system a promising candidate for novel applications.

Human motion analysis from UAV video

Purpose n n n n nThe purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary solution to address the problem of estimating human pose and trajectory by an aerial robot with a monocular camera in near real time. n n n n nDesign/methodology/approach n n n n nThe distinguishing feature of the solution is a dynamic classifier selection architecture. Each video frame is corrected for perspective using projective transformation. Then, a silhouette is extracted as a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). The HOG is then classified using a dynamic classifier. A class is defined as a pose-viewpoint pair, and a total of 64 classes are defined to represent a forward walking and turning gait sequence. The dynamic classifier consists of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier C64 that recognizes all 64 classes, and 64 SVM classifiers that recognize four classes each – these four classes are chosen based on the temporal relationship between them, dictated by the gait sequence. n n n n nFindings n n n n nThe solution provides three main advantages: first, classification is efficient due to dynamic selection (4-class vs 64-class classification). Second, classification errors are confined to neighbors of the true viewpoints. This means a wrongly estimated viewpoint is at most an adjacent viewpoint of the true viewpoint, enabling fast recovery from incorrect estimations. Third, the robust temporal relationship between poses is used to resolve the left-right ambiguities of human silhouettes. n n n n nOriginality/value n n n n nExperiments conducted on both fronto-parallel videos and aerial videos confirm that the solution can achieve accurate pose and trajectory estimation for these different kinds of videos. For example, the “walking on an 8-shaped path” data set (1,652 frames) can achieve the following estimation accuracies: 85 percent for viewpoints and 98.14 percent for poses.

An efficient motion magnification system for real-time applications

The human eye cannot see subtle motion signals that fall outside human visual limits, due to either limited resolution of intensity variations or lack of sensitivity to lower spatial and temporal frequencies. Yet, these invisible signals can be highly informative when amplified to be observable by a human operator or an automatic machine vision system. Many video magnification techniques have recently been proposed to magnify and reveal these signals in videos and image sequences. Limitations, including noise level, video quality and long execution time, are associated with the existing video magnification techniques. Therefore, there is value in developing a new magnification method where these issues are the main consideration. This study presents a new magnification method that outperforms other magnification techniques in terms of noise removal, video quality at large magnification factor and execution time. The proposed method is compared with four methods, including Eulerian video magnification, phase-based video magnification, Riesz pyramid for fast phase-based video magnification and enhanced Eulerian video magnification. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed magnification method regarding all video quality metrics used. Our method is also 60–70% faster than Eulerian video magnification, whereas other competing methods take longer to execute than Eulerian video magnification.

Detection of Cardiopulmonary Activity and Related Abnormal Events Using Microsoft Kinect Sensor

Monitoring of cardiopulmonary activity is a challenge when attempted under adverse conditions, including different sleeping postures, environmental settings, and an unclear region of interest (ROI). This study proposes an efficient remote imaging system based on a Microsoft Kinect v2 sensor for the observation of cardiopulmonary-signal-and-detection-related abnormal cardiopulmonary events (e.g., tachycardia, bradycardia, tachypnea, bradypnea, and central apnoea) in many possible sleeping postures within varying environmental settings including in total darkness and whether the subject is covered by a blanket or not. The proposed system extracts the signal from the abdominal-thoracic region where cardiopulmonary activity is most pronounced, using a real-time image sequence captured by Kinect v2 sensor. The proposed system shows promising results in any sleep posture, regardless of illumination conditions and unclear ROI even in the presence of a blanket, whilst being reliable, safe, and cost-effective.

Cardiopulmonary signal acquisition from different regions using video imaging analysis

AbstractActivity of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems causes some imperceptible physiological and physical effects in different regions of the human body, which can be highly informative i...