The contactless estimation of vital signs using conventional color cameras and ambient light can be affected by motion artifacts and changes in ambient light. On both these problems, a multimodal 3D imaging system with an irritation-free controlled illumination was developed in this work. In this system, real-time 3D imaging was combined with multispectral and thermal imaging. Based on 3D image data, an efficient method was developed for the compensation of head motions, and novel approaches based on the use of 3D regions of interest were proposed for the estimation of various vital signs from multispectral and thermal video data. The developed imaging system and algorithms were demonstrated with test subjects, delivering a proof-of-concept.
Lens undistortion and image rectification is a commonly used pre-processing, e.g. for active or passive stereo vision to reduce the complexity of the search for matching points. The undistortion and rectification is implemented in a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The algorithm is performed pixel by pixel. The challenges of the implementation are the synchronisation of the data streams and the limited memory bandwidth. Due to the memory constraints, the algorithm utilises a pre-computed lossy compression of the rectification maps by a ratio of eight. The compressed maps occupy less space by ignoring the pixel indexes, sub-sampling both maps, and reducing repeated information in a row by forming differences to adjacent pixels. Undistorted and rectified images are calculated once without and once with the compressed transformation map. The deviation between the different computed images is minimal and negligible. The functionality of the hardware module, the decompression algorithm and the processing pipeline are described. The algorithm is validated on a Xilinx Zynq-7020 SoC. The stereo setup has a baseline with 46 mm and non-converged optical axis between the cameras. The cameras are configured at 1.3 Mpix @ 60 fps and distortion correction and rectification is performed in real time during image capture. With a camera resolution of 1280 pixels × 960 pixels and a maximum vertical shift of ± 20 pixels, the efficient hardware implementation utilizes 12 % of available block RAM resources.
<p>Over the past decades, a large number of imaging sensors based mostly on CCD or CMOS technology were developed. Datasheets provided by their developers are usually written on their own standards and no universal figure of merit can be drawn from them for comparison purposes. The EMVA 1288 is a standard aims to overcome this problem by setting parameters and experimental setup for radiometric characterisation of cameras. An implementation of an experimental setup and software environment for radiometric characterisation of imaging sensors following the guidelines of the EMVA 1288 is presented here. Using simulations, the influences and impact of several EMVA 1288 parameters on geometric measurements can be estimated. This paper also presents a signal model and image acquisition chain; measurements of radiometric characteristics of an image sensor; and sensor evaluation for geometric measurements, where the aforementioned influences on geometric measurements are discussed.</p>
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