Height Estimation of Children under Five Years using Depth Images
Anusua Trivedi, Mohit Jain, Nikhil Gupta, Markus Hinsche, Prashant Singh, Markus Matiaschek, Tristan Behrens, Mirco Militeri, Cameron Birge, Shivangi Kaushik, Archisman Mohapatra, Rita Chatterjee, Rahul Dodhia, Juan Lavista Ferres
Abstract
Malnutrition is a global health crisis and is a leading cause of death among children under 5 years. Detecting malnutrition requires anthropometric measurements of weight, height, and middle-upper arm circumference. However, measuring them accurately is a challenge, especially in the global south, due to limited resources. In this work, we propose a CNN-based approach to estimate the height of standing children under 5 years from depth images collected using a smartphone. According to the SMART Methodology Manual, the acceptable accuracy for height is less than 1.4 cm. On training our deep learning model on 87131 depth images, our model achieved a mean absolute error of 1.64% on 57064 test images. For 70.3% test images, we estimated height accurately within the acceptable 1.4 cm range. Thus, our proposed solution can accurately detect stunting (low height-for-age) in standing children below 5 years of age.