A Thermal-Optical Vision System for Identification and Localization of Symptomatic COVID-19 Patients

世界卫生组织（WHO）官员表示，及时识别和隔离冠状病毒感染者是遏制病毒传播的关键。由于缺乏检测试剂盒、实验室用品和人员，体温筛查仍然是识别高危人群的主要方法。热筛查是非侵入性的，可对COVID-19的主要症状之一立即产生效果。然而，目前在“高流量”环境中进行COVID-19公共筛查的方法涉及手持温度测量，这被认为是低效、无效的，并且对筛查者和其他急性病患者有潜在风险。使用距离测量单位仅依赖于升高的皮肤温度（而不是核心温度）也可能给出假阳性分类结果。据推测，将温度测量与身体步态模式（标记）融合将提高识别有症状的COVID-19患者的准确性。 在这个项目中，瑞尔森大学的研究人员与Altius Analytics Labs合作，以提高COVID-19公共筛查和疾病跟踪的可扩展性和效率。该项目的主要目标是开发、验证和测试一种新型的基于热光学视觉的系统，以自动识别大规模有症状的个体，并跟踪他们在环境中的运动。这一项目的成果将产生重大影响，保护公众健康免受当前大流行病的影响，并为防范潜在的第二波疫情提供保障。除了医学筛查应用外，结果还可以扩展到人为因素行业。最后，该项目还包括对已建立和新兴领域的高素质人员（HQP）进行重要的多学科培训，包括人体运动学，仪器仪表，机器视觉，信号处理和机器学习。HQP还将有机会与项目合作伙伴一起工作，并获得与职业相关的行业经验。

According to World Health Organization (WHO) officials, timely identification and isolation of individuals infected with coronavirus is the key to containing the spread of the virus. With a shortage of testing kits, laboratory supplies, and personnel, temperature screening remains the primary approach to identifying high risk individuals. Thermal screening is non-invasive and gives immediate results for one of the primary symptoms of COVID-19. However, current methods of COVID-19 public screening in 'high traffic' environments involve handheld temperature measurements which are considered inefficient, ineffective, and potentially risky to the screener and other acutely ill patients. Relying on only elevated skin temperatures (and not core temperatures) using distance measurement units might also give false positive classification results. It is hypothesized that fusing temperature measurements with body gait patterns (markers) would increase the accuracy of identifying symptomatic COVID -19 patients. In this project, researchers from Ryerson University are partnering with Altius Analytics Labs to enhance the scalability and efficiency of COVID-19 public screening and disease tracking. The main goal of the project is to develop, validate, and test a novel thermal-optical vision-based system to automatically identify symptomatic individuals on a large scale and track their movement through an environment. The outcome of this project will have a significant impact, protecting public health for the current pandemic and providing safeguards against a potential second wave. In addition to medical screening applications, results can be extended to the human factors industry as well. Finally, the project includes significant multidisciplinary training of highly qualified personnel (HQP) in established and emerging areas, including kinesiology, instrumentation, machine vision, signal processing, and machine learning. HQP will also have opportunities to work with the project partner and gain career relevant industrial experience.