Towards health monitoring in visual surveillance

This paper presents a feasibility study on heart rate detection using a digital camera. The paper investigates the possibility of Heart rate detection for individuals far from the camera sensor. The study is done to exploit the feasibility for heart rate estimation using a digital camera to enables health monitoring in visual surveillance. An experiment was conducted using 14 healthy subjects of various skin tones. State of the art heart rate estimation methods from photoplethysmography and ballistocardiography was implemented. The method were experimented on videos of subjects that were standing away 5 meters from the camera. Results derived showed that the technology has many challenges are to be overcome. The effect of ambient light variation, involuntary artifact movement, and poor signal to noise ratio are some of the problems to be addressed.