Detection and enhancement pf blood flow in a video

Lucas Vandroux

Semester Project

Section of Communication Systems, EPFL

July 2014

Abstract

This project wants to show that it's possible to simply measure the heart pulse of a person with a video camera and simple signal processing. Nowadays, people want to know the heart rate whenever and wherever they are. However, the medical devices are most of the time too big, too expensive and too complex to use. We want to propose a simple and accurate solution that can be used with existing devices with no additional cost. There are already numerous applications developped for smartphones or wrist cuff based on various methods. However, this project uses a different approach by computing the heart rate of a person from the color variation of his face due to the blood flow under the skin. The algorithm is doing simple signal processing to pick up the frequency with the highest energy in a specific range. Finally, we also show a potential application of this method using new web technologies and implementing it with the JavaScript language.