Intelligent Recognition Method of Infant Sleeping Position Based on Thermal Infrared Imaging

The sleeping position monitoring of infant is a very important component of baby safe custody. Existing infant sleep monitoring mainly rely on human duty, which is usually easy to cause urgent infant events not to be timely detected and treated, especially when the guardian is sleeping at night. In this paper, we propose an intelligent recognition method of infant sleeping position based on thermal infrared imaging, aiming to overcome the deficiencies of the prior art on infant sleep monitoring. Firstly we capture real-time thermal infrared images on infant sleeping with thermal imager, in a non-touch way. Then we detect the position of infant’s nose or mouth as well as the position of infant's head area. Next we discriminate the sleeping position of infant's head according to the relative position of nose or mouth to the detected head area. Finally when the recognized sleeping position is dangerous or with a security risk to infant, we remind the guardian through triggering early warning module to generate alarm. Real data have been used to test the proposed approach and very good results have been achieved, validating it.