Video Based Heart Rate Measurement

Abstract

As per modern medical Science, doctors measure a pulse of an individual to know the heart strength and to know whether any irregularities in the rhythm of a person’s heart. It helps doctors to get an indication whether the patient has a severe heart condition or other medical problem that means it will just indicate them the condition of one’s heart and make them do further tests to know the conditions of other body parts. The Ayurvedic pulse diagnosis method also says, by palpating on the radial artery, one can know if there are any anomalies in any of the body parts or internal organs like Heart, kidney, spleen, bladder, liver, small intestine, etc., all at once. Both methods tell us the importance of Pulse, and there can be other ways to measure it. Here we tried to measure the pulse visually using image processing. We propose a system to measure pulse by detecting subtle head motion caused by Newtonian reaction to the inflow of blood per beat. It uses video processing techniques to detect head motion along with the apparently invisible inflow of blood per beat. We track the features from the head with the help of KLT tracker and perform principal component analysis (PCA) to decompose their trajectories. The peaks of these trajectories are detected to find the pulse rate.