An improved procedure for the extraction of temporal motion strength signals from video recordings of neonatal seizures

This paper presents a procedure developed to extract quantitative motion information from video recordings of neonatal seizures in the form of temporal motion strength signals. Temporal motion strength signals are obtained from a sequence of video frames by measuring the displacement areas of the infants’ moving body part(s) from frame to frame of the video sequence. The proposed motion segmentation procedure relies on the application of non-linear filtering, vector clustering, and morphological filtering to the differences between adjacent frames. The experiments indicate that temporal motion strength signals constitute a satisfactory representation of videotaped clinical events and may be used for automated seizure recognition. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.