Influence of Depth Camera Noise Models on Respiration Estimation

Abstract: Depth cameras are an interesting modality for capturing vital signs such as respiratory rate. Plenty approaches exist to extract vital signs in a controlled setting, but in order to apply them more flexibly for example in multi-camera settings, a simulated environment is needed to generate enough data for training and testing of new algorithms. We show first results of a 3D-rendering simulation pipeline that focuses on different noise models in order to generate realistic, depth-camera based respiratory signals using both synthetic and real respiratory signals as a baseline. While most noise can be accurately modelled as Gaussian in this context, we can show that as soon as the available image resolution is too low, the differences between different noise models surface.