Imafor: Fast and safe body temperature screening

Elevated body temperature is a common indicator of many infectious diseases. Detecting it on time can help contain the spread of such a disease where it’s most likely to happen – in large crowds. To make body temperature screening fast, safe and efficient, Imafor – a daughter company of Termisk Systemteknik – developed a smart thermal solution.

Precise, real-time screening

When it comes to infectious diseases, minimizing potential exposure is crucial. Since the risk of exposure tends to be the highest in crowded environments, Imafor’s smart thermal solution was designed to screen a moving crowd for individuals with elevated body temperature.

The system consists of a visual and a thermal camera. The visual camera tracks faces and displays photos, while the thermal one measures eye-corner temperature. This way, the system can identify individuals with an elevated body temperature from a distance of up to 5 meters.

To scan the crowd efficiently, Imafor used our proven face tracking technology. FaceTrack’s smart algorithms detect and track multiple faces simultaneously. This way, multiple faces can be processed at the same time in order to get one alarm per face (instead of one alarm per image).

The tracker can detect 99 different facial landmarks. This makes it easy to identify specific facial areas of interest. For example, inner eye corners are the preferred measurement area since their temperature is the closest indication of the actual body temperature.

Finally, FaceTrack is extremely lightweight, which allows it to run smoothly without overloading the system.

Helping detect and contain disease spread

Imafor’s body temperature screening solution is fast and contactless. By combining a visual and a thermal camera, it can closely estimate the body temperature of the screened individual in real time.

This stand-alone solution extracts the temperatures from thermal images and compares their values to specific thresholds. When it detects an individual with a body temperature higher than the specified threshold, it sends out an alarm. That way, the necessary precautions can be taken on time.

The solution is designed for optimal user experience – both for the people being screened and the staff monitoring the system. The screening is completely automatic and happens in real time, as people walk by the camera. This way, all the healthy individuals are able to pass the checkpoint easily, without the need for unnecessary stops. Such an efficient, non-invasive solution is ideal for fast-paced environments such as airports, train stations or bus terminals.

Monitoring the number of people with elevated body temperature helps provide early warnings and analysis of pandemic spread. During non-alarm times, it remains a valuable tool for statistical data collection that can help detect potential threats at their early stages.