Person Detection and Breath Estimation Using 3D Vision Sensor

Abstract

Sleep apnea syndrome (SAS: Sleep Apnea Syndrome) is well-known as a disease that falls into intermittent apnea when sleeping. The estimated number of patients with SAS is known to be about 2% (2-3 million) of the Japanese population, many patients are not aware because of the disease occurring during sleep. This paper proposes a method of extracting breathing frequency necessary for SAS diagnosis using time series data of distance information on 2D image obtained from 3D vision sensor. At this time, in order to accurately estimate the breathing frequency, the position of the subject is detected from the distance information, and the frequency analysis of the distance information is performed only for the position of the detected subject. By verification using healthy subjects, the authors confirmed that the proposed method can correctly acquire the position of the subject and can estimate the breathing frequency of the subject.