Motion tracking in infrared imaging for quantitative medical diagnostic applications

• Motion tracking in high-accuracy quantitative IR imaging in medicine is considered.
• The measured thermal signature is small, of the order of 0.1 °C.
• The tracked object is not directly detectable in the IR image.
• The template-based tracking algorithm was successfully implemented.
• Template update may be needed for significant temperature changes during imaging.

In medical applications, infrared (IR) thermography is used to detect and examine the thermal signature of skin abnormalities by quantitatively analyzing skin temperature in steady state conditions or its evolution over time, captured in an image sequence. However, during the image acquisition period, the involuntary movements of the patient are unavoidable, and such movements will undermine the accuracy of temperature measurement for any particular location on the skin. In this study, a tracking approach using a template-based algorithm is proposed, to follow the involuntary motion of the subject in the IR image sequence. The motion tacking will allow to associate a temperature evolution to each spatial location on the body while the body moves relative to the image frame. The affine transformation model is adopted to estimate the motion parameters of the template image. The Lucas–Kanade algorithm is applied to search for the optimized parameters of the affine transformation. A weighting mask is incorporated into the algorithm to ensure its tracking robustness. To evaluate the feasibility of the tracking approach, two sets of IR image sequences with random in-plane motion were tested in our experiments. A steady-state (no heating or cooling) IR image sequence in which the skin temperature is in equilibrium with the environment was considered first. The thermal recovery IR image sequence, acquired when the skin is recovering from 60-s cooling, was the second case analyzed. By proper selection of the template image along with template update, satisfactory tracking results were obtained for both IR image sequences. The achieved tracking accuracies are promising in terms of satisfying the demands imposed by clinical applications of IR thermography.