Body temperature measurement of an animal by tracking in biomedical experiments

In this paper, we present a method to measure the body temperature of an animal using a thermographic camera in hyperthermia experiments, where the heat contrast between the animal and its background is low. This work was done in the context of the study of artificially induced atypical febrile seizures. In order to measure the temperature of a moving animal continuously, we need to detect it in each video frame and then select a subset of pixels to evaluate its body temperature. To detect the animal in each frame, we propose a tracking method based on the minimization of a cost function that uses constraints such as temperature smoothness and proximity. The temperature of the animal is then taken as the mean of a subset of pixels from the detected area. For videos up to 19,000 frames long, the method achieves temperature estimation within 0.7∘C\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$0.7\,^{\circ }\text{ C }$$\end{document} from ground-truth more than 73 % of the time in difficult measurement scenarios.