Optimal Image Characterization for In-Bed Posture Classification by Using SVM Algorithm

Identifying patient posture while they are lying in bed is an important task in medical applications such as monitoring a patient after a surgical intervention, sleep supervision to identify behavioral and physiological markers, or for bedsore prevention. An acceptable strategy to identify the patient’s position is the classification of images created from a grid of pressure sensors located in the bed. These samples can be arranged based on supervised learning methods. Usually, image conditioning is required before images are loaded into a learning method to increase classification accuracy. However, continuous monitoring of a person requires large amounts of time and computational resources if complex pre-processing algorithms are used. So, the problem is to classify the image posture of patients with different weights, heights, and positions by using minimal sample conditioning for a specific supervised learning method. In this work, it is proposed to identify the patient posture from pressure sensor images by using well-known and simple conditioning techniques and selecting the optimal texture descriptors for the Support Vector Machine (SVM) method. This is in order to obtain the best classification and to avoid image over-processing in the conditioning stage for the SVM. The experimental stages are performed with the color models Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) and Hue, Saturation, and Value (HSV). The results show an increase in accuracy from 86.9% to 92.9% and in kappa value from 0.825 to 0.904 using image conditioning with histogram equalization and a median filter, respectively.