Toshiba Engineering Corporation

Hiroaki Nakai

Ken Ishihara

Mutsumi Watanabe

Keisuke Takada

Yoshio Miyake

A region-of-interest (ROI) setting apparatus for respiration monitoring and a respiration monitoring system capable of setting an ROI in an automatic manner. Absolute values of subtractions between every successive two of a plurality of frame images photographed by a CCD camera 2 for a period of time equal to half a respiration period are calculated, then summed and stored. Based on the change information thus calculated and stored, the position and size of each changed region is calculated. Provisional regions are set from the changed regions successively from the greatest to the smallest one thereof. In each of these provisional regions, it is determined whether a gray level histogram indicative of distribution of the number of pixels for respective gray level values includes a twin peak characteristic having twin peaks each equal to or higher than a predetermined value, and whether the area of the corresponding changed region is equal to or greater than a predetermined value. One of the provisional regions that satisfies these conditions is set as an ROI.

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Kobe, Japan

Hiroaki Nakai