Visualizing skin temperature before, during and after exercise for dynamic area telethermometry

Abstract

The dynamic behavior of human skin temperature has potential clinical diagnosis values. The method and material for acquiring and implementing thermal data plays an important role for obtaining a confirmed thermographic diagnosis. High resolution, both temperature and spatial, is required in order to see a dramatically different behavior between the data obtained in a group of patients and the one observed in a group of normal subjects.In this paper, a specific exercise is designed; we visualize the skin temperature before, during and after the exercise. Over 2000 frames during the period were captured, and the skin temperature of the regions of interest is analyzed statistically. In order to visualize the FFT to yield the relative contributions of its underlying frequency over the series of frames, the average temperature of the region of interest is obtained in order to average out some of the spurious noise. The subareas of interest are detected automatically using region-growing technique.The results are obtained using an infrared imaging system at a frame rate 30 frames per second.