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Heart rate is one of the most important biological features for health information. Most of the state-of-the-art heart rate monitoring systems rely on contact technologies that require physical contact with the user. In this paper, we discuss a proof-of-concept of a non-contact technology based on a single camera to measure the user’s heart rate in real time. The algorithm estimates the heart rate based on facial color changes. The input is a series of video frames with the automatically detected face of the user. A Gaussian pyramid spatial filter is applied to the inputs to obtain a down-sampled high signal-to-noise ratio images. A temporal Fourier transform is applied to the video to get the signal spectrum. Next, a temporal band-pass filter is applied to the transformed signal in the frequency domain to extract the frequency band of heart beats. We then used the dominant frequency in the Fourier domain to find the heart rate.

Camera data generated in a 3D virtual environment has been used to train object detection and identification algorithms. 40 common US road traffic signs were used as the objects of interest during the investigation of these methods. Traffic signs were placed randomly alongside the road in front of a camera in a virtual driving environment, after the camera itself was randomly placed along the road at an appropriate height for a camera located on a vehicle’s rear view mirror. In order to best represent the real world, effects such as shadows, occlusions, washout/fade, skew, rotations, reflections, fog, rain, snow and varied illumination were randomly included in the generated data. Images were generated at a rate of approximately one thousand per minute, and the image data was automatically annotated with the true location of each sign within each image, to facilitate supervised learning as well as testing of the trained algorithms.