A Vision-based System for Breathing Disorder Identification: A Deep Learning Perspective

Recent breakthroughs in computer vision offer an exciting avenue to develop new remote, and non-intrusive patient monitoring techniques. A very challenging topic to address is the automated recognition of breathing disorders during sleep. Due to its complexity, this task has rarely been explored in the literature on real patients using such marker-free approaches. Here, we propose an approach based on deep learning architectures capable of classifying breathing disorders. The classification is performed on depth maps recorded with 3D cameras from 76 patients referred to a sleep laboratory that present a range of breathing disorders. Our system is capable of classifying individual breathing events as normal or abnormal with an accuracy of 61.8%, hence our results show that computer vision and deep learning are viable tools for assessing locally or remotely breathing quality during sleep.