Nostril-Anchored Geometric ROI Projection for Contactless Forehead Skin Temperature Estimation Using Low-Resolution Thermal Imaging

(1) Background: Reliable forehead region-of-interest (ROI) localization remains challenging in low-resolution thermal imaging because limited spatial detail increases localization uncertainty. This study develops a lightweight nostril-anchored geometric ROI projection method for contactless forehead skin temperature estimation. (2) Methods: The forehead ROI was projected from the detected nostril bounding box using anthropometry-guided proportional geometry, followed by 95th-percentile (P95) spatial aggregation and exponential moving average (EMA) stabilization. Direct localization was evaluated against fixed-crop and MediaPipe Pose-based baselines using 120 annotated pilot frames across 0.5–1.5 m, followed by validation on 150 additional annotated frames from ten formal participants. A medical non-contact infrared forehead thermometer targeting the same central forehead region was used as a practical, rather than traceably calibrated, comparator. (3) Results: The proposed method outperformed the two localization baselines in the pilot evaluation. Formal-cohort validation achieved an overall IoU of 0.714, FIR of 0.870, and NCE of 0.091, with a 0.7% spatial-failure rate. Across 90 temperature measurements, the method achieved an MAE of 0.514 °C, RMSE of 0.614 °C, and mean bias of −0.187 °C, with 95% Bland–Altman limits of agreement from −1.340 °C to 0.966 °C. Real-time implementation achieved 24.12±1.43 FPS on a Jetson Orin Nano. (4) Conclusions: The proposed method provides a computationally efficient forehead ROI localization approach for low-resolution thermal imaging. Localization was strongest at 0.5 m and lower at farther distances; therefore, its scale adaptation should not be interpreted as distance-invariant performance. The temperature results represent agreement with the practical comparator rather than absolute clinical accuracy.