Mobile-platform for Automatic Fever Screening

System based on Infrared Forehead Temperature

Armote Somboonkaew*, Panintorn Prempree, Sirajit Vuttivong, Jutaphet Wetcharungsri, Supanit Porntheeraphat,
Sataporn Chanhorm, Prasit Pongsoon, Ratthasart Amarit, Yuttana Intaravanne, Kosom Chaitavon, Sarun
Sumriddetchkajorn
Photonics Technology Laboratory, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC),
National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA)
Pathum Thani, Thailand
*Email: armote.somboonkaew@nectec.or.th

Abstract— In this paper, automatic fever screening system is
proposed and experimentally implemented using an IR camera
and a mobile phone. Our system locates position of patients
automatically using face detection algorithm on RGB image and
obtains temperature from IR image at detected location.
Advantages are fast, portable, non-contacting and simultaneously
temperature measurement. Furthermore, face detection
algorithm allows the system to track patient’s face position.
Hence, robust and non-contacting temperature measurement can
be properly done even patients are not stand still. Our system has
been field-tested to measure temperature and screen ill patients
at a children medical clinic. In this experiment, the system is
calibrated to measure temperature of patients at 1 meter away
and gives an alarm sound when the measured temperature is
above the desired setting threshold. According to experimental
results, the correlation coefficient between temperature obtained
from our system and commercial infrared forehead skin
thermometer [2] is more than 0.80. In addition, our system
achieves a 100% sensitivity and 70% specificity. Although our
approach loses specificity, all fever patients are identified
correctly. Thus, they are significantly correlated. Therefore, this
system can reliably estimate body temperature of patients and
can be used for effectively pre-screening fever patients.
Keyword- Infrared, non-contact temperature measurement,
automatic fever screening measurement, mobile device, face
detection
I.   INTRODUCTION
Medical service in most hospital starts with patients’
temperature measurement and then screening fever patients.
Core temperature can be accurately estimated by measuring
axillary or oral temperature using stick type, or glass
thermometers. However, these methods are not convenient due
to uncooperative patients, especially for young children, and
time-consuming. Therefore, some hospitals start using an
infrared forehead skin thermometer instead. This thermometer
measures intensity infrared, which emits from skin, and
converts it to temperature. According to [1], the axillary
temperature and infrared forehead skin temperature are
strongly correlated. Thus, body temperature can also be
estimated by using emission of infrared from the forehead
Even though using the infrared forehead skin thermometer is
convenience, however, it requires a few seconds to complete
the measurement. Furthermore, number of measurement is
strictly limited to one person at a time. Therefore, this scheme
is not suitable for massive human temperature screening in
large public area, which needs faster screening rate to avoid
congestion. According to [4][5], high-throughput and non-
contact human temperature screening system can be achieved
by using 2D thermal imaging device, so called IR camera, and
human flow management. Nevertheless, this system cannot be
used with ease due to size of 2D thermal imaging device and
installation cost.
Because of an improvement of 2D thermal imaging
technology, size and price of IR camera is reduced
considerably. Therefore, it is possible to design a mobile,
high-throughput and non-contact human temperature
screening system based on 2D thermal imaging device.
II.   METHODOLOGY
Our approach is a parallel image processing of an RGB image
from visible camera and a thermal image from IR camera.
The RGB image is used for targeting area of measurement.
Then, maximum temperature in corresponding area is obtained
from the thermal image. Even though this procedure seems to
be simple, however, mapping position between two images
from difference cameras is quite complicated due to different
hardware characteristics such as field of view (FOV) and
image resolution in pixels. Therefore, it is necessary to do
image alignment between images from each camera to avoid
incorrect mapping.

Fig.1 Flowchart of image processing in locating human face
and temperature measurement
A.   Image alignment
An image alignment consists of two procedures; image
cropping and image scaling. Cropped image’s position and
area depends on FOV of each camera and distance between
imaging device and target. At same distance, camera with
larger FOV can capture wider area than camera with smaller
FOV as shown in Fig.2. Therefore, in order to precisely crop
and align two images, measurement space and distance from
two camera need to be carefully considered. Next, cropped
images might have different pixel density if the resolution of
each original image is not the same. This leads to incorrect
coordinates mapping between two image. Thus, image scaling
is required to guarantee correctness of coordinate mapping.
B.   Target localization
The objective of our system is to automatically do human
temperature screening. Thus, our target is limited to human
only. There are various methods to detect and track human
position [6][7][8]. In our approach, build-in face detection
algorithm for RGB image is used. This algorithm does not
only give position of human face in image but also provide
other useful information of human face such as estimate face’s
area, face’s orientation and eye’s position. Then, the
information from this algorithm is used for obtaining
temperature from thermal image. Since RGB and thermal
image is already aligned in previous section, the information
obtained from RGB image can be easily and precisely mapped
to thermal image.
Fig.2 Comparison capture area of two different field of view
(FOV) at same distanc
e
Fig. 3 Resulted mage after processing
C.   Temperature measurement
In order to measure core temperature of human, besides oral
temperature, temperature is usually measured where skin is
thin, for example, neck, forehead or ears [ref?]. In previous
section, human face’s information is obtained from face
detection algorithm. So, it is simply to locate forehead’s
position in thermal image since area and position of face are
already known. Our approach does not only obtain
temperature at forehead but it will search for position in face’s
area where temperature is highest and then gets temperature at
that position from thermal image.
After processing, the measured temperature of each target will
be shown near the forehead of corresponding targets as shown
in Fig. 3
III.   FIELD TEST STUDY
Our field test takes place at medical service center’s pediatrics
section in Bangkok as shown in Fig.4a and National
Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) as
shown in Fig. 4b . A thermal imaging camera in this set-up is a
160x120-pixel FLIRONE™ [3] with maximum frame rate of 8
fps. A 2D temperature sensor of this thermal imaging camera
has dynamic range of -20˚C to 120˚C with ±3˚C accuracy. Our
mobile device is a tablet having 2.16-GHz Apple A97 dual
core with 2GB RAM. Visible and thermal image are processed
and updated on tablet’s screen at an average speed of 7 fps. In
addition, during our testing (6-h), surrounding temperature and
humidity are measured to observe its effect on system’s
performance. According to result, if environment is not greatly
changed, there is no significant effect on the accuracy of our
system. The field-test at NECTEC aims to verify accuracy of
our system compare with commercial infrared forehead
thermomerr. For field-test at medical service center,
performance of temperature screening is examined.
 (a) (b)
Fig.4 Field-test set up at medical service center’s pediatric
section
A.   Accuracy of temperature measurement
In the field-test at NECTEC, patient’s body temperature has
been measured using both commercial forehead skin infrared
thermometer and our system. The forehead skin infrared
thermometer used in this field-test is NC150, Micolife™ [2],
which has measurement accuracy of ±0.2˚C between 36˚C and
39˚C. The field-test begins with preparation our system.
Firstly, our system is operated and left idle for 5 minutes.
During idle state, it will self-calibrate and adjust measured
values in accord with surrounding temperature and humidity.
Next, certain offset value (usually within ±2˚C) is set in order
to make measured temperature close to inner body
temperature. Exact inner body temperature is obtained by
measuring aural or axillary temperature using glass
thermometer. Finally, after complete preparing our system, we
follow procedure shown in Fig.5. Each step of measurement is
repeated three times to ensure correctness of recorded
temperatures. According to results, temperature measured
from our system and forehead skin infrared thermometer are
correlated with correlation coefficient 0.63. The average error
is 0.32˚C with standard deviation of 0.27˚C. In addition,
relationship between our system and forehead skin infrared
thermometer are shown in Fig.6. Even though correlation
between our approach and commercial device is a bit low, the
average error is still in acceptable range.
Fig.5 Measurement procedure
Fig.6 Relationship between our system and forehead skin
infrared thermometer at NECTEC
B.   Study of human fever identification
Besides good accuracy of measurement, sensitivity and
specificity in identifying unhealthy patients are also important
parameters for evaluating system’s performance. In our study,
the sensitivity is defined as a probability of the test gives
positive in a febrile patient population. In the other hand, the
specificity is defined as probability of the test gives negatives
in population of patients who have no fever. In our study, we
consider patient whose body temperature above 37.5˚C as
febrile patients. Then, we follow the same procedure as the
field-test at NECTEC. During one-day field test at medical
service center, there are 14 patients with fever out of 62
patients. The measured sensitivity and specificity of our
system is 100% and 70% when temperature threshold is
37.5˚C, respectively. Even though our system has lost
specificity, all febrile patients are identified correctly. In, a 2-
by-2 contingency table is shown in Table 1. In addition,
temperature measured from our system and forehead skin
infrared thermometer are significantly correlated with
correlation coefficient 0.80. The average error is 0.66˚C with
standard deviation of 0.51˚C. In addition, relationship between
our system and forehead skin infrared thermometer are shown
in Fig.7.
Fig.7 Relationship between our system and forehead skin
infrared thermometer at medical service center

 
  Fever
  No
 Fever
  Test Study of Our Non-Invasive Thermal Image Analyzer for
Deceptive Detection," in Biophotonics 2007: Optics in Life
Positive
 
  14
  14
  Science, J. Popp and G. von Bally, eds., Vol. 6633 of
Negative
  0
  34
  Proceedings of SPIE-OSA Biomedical Optics (Optical Society
of America, 2007), paper 6633_50.
Table 1 Contingency table of human fever screening
[6] L. Li and W. Hu, "New moving human detecting and
tracking algorithm," 2010 3rd International Congress on
IV.   CONLCUSION Image and Signal Processing, Yantai, 2010, pp. 345-348.
Instead of usual procedure for human fever screening, we [7] P. M. Maurer, "A universal symmetry detection
introduce a mobile-platform for automatic forehead fever algorithm," 2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe
screening using 2D thermal imaging device and normal Conference & Exhibition (DATE), Dresden, 2014, pp. 1-4.
imaging device. Our approach consists of three main [8] Songyan Ma and Lu Bai, "A face detection algorithm
procedures; image alignment, target localization and based on Adaboost and new Haar-Like feature," 2016 7th
temperature measurement. Our system can achieve maximum IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and
of 7 frames per second for processing 3 – 5 faces at a time. Service Science (ICSESS), Beijing, 2016, pp. 651-654.
However, this depends on performance of main processing
device. According to field test result, our system can achieve
100% sensitivity and 70% specificity for screening high
temperature patients. In addition, the accuracy of 2D thermal
imaging camera depends on surrounding temperature and also
device temperature. During our field test, we found that
accuracy of our system is significantly dropped when
surrounding temperature is considerably changed or
temperature of thermal imaging device is higher.
V.   ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Author would like to thank 1) National Electronics and

Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) for supporting
funding and location for field-test 2) Medical service center in
Bangkok for arranging the measurement area

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