Contact-free heartbeat signal for human identification and forensics

Abstract

The heartbeat signal, which is one of the physiological signals, is of great importance in many real-world applications, for example, in patient monitoring and biometric recognition. The traditional methods for measuring such this signal use contact-based sensors that need to be installed on the subject’s body. Though it might be possible to use touch-based sensors in applications like patient monitoring, it will not be that easy to use them in identification and forensics applications, especially if subjects are not cooperative. To deal with this problem, recently computer vision techniques have been developed for contact-free extraction of the heartbeat signal. We have recently used the contact-free measured heartbeat signal, for biometric recognition, and have obtained promising results, indicating the importance of these signals for biometrics recognition and also for forensics applications. The importance of heartbeat signal, its contact-based and contact-free extraction methods, and the results of its employment for identification purposes, including our very recent achievements, are reviewed in this chapter.