Fingertips segmentation of thermal images and its potential use in hand thermoregulation analysis

Abstract

Thermoregulation refers to the physiological processes that maintain stable the body temperatures. Infrared thermography is a non-invasive technique useful for visualizing these temperatures. Previous works suggest it is important to analyze thermoregulation in peripheral regions, such as the fingertips, because some disabling pathologies affect particularly the thermoregulation of these regions. This work proposes an algorithm for fingertip segmentation in thermal images of the hand. By using a supervised index, the results are compared against segmentations provided by humans. The results are outstanding even when the analyzed images are highly resized.