Automatic roI detection for camera-based pulse-rate measurement

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contactless measurement of pulse-rate by detecting pulse-induced colour changes on human skin using a regular camera. Most of existing rPPG methods exploit the subject face as the Region of Interest (RoI) for pulse-rate measurement by automatic face detection. However, face detection is a suboptimal solution since (1) not all the subregions in a face contain the skin pixels where pulse-signal can be extracted, (2) it fails to locate the RoI in cases when the frontal face is invisible (e.g., side-view faces). In this paper, we present a novel automatic RoI detection method for camerabased pulse-rate measurement, which consists of three main steps: subregion tracking, feature extraction, and clustering of skin regions. To evaluate the robustness of the proposed method, 36 video recordings are made of 6 subjects with different skin-types performing 6 types of head motion. Experimental results show that for the video sequences containing subjects with brighter skin-types and modest body motions, the accuracy of the pulse-rates measured by our method (94 %) is comparable to that obtained by a face detector (92 %), while the average SNR is significantly improved from 5.8 dB to 8.6 dB

Face detection and clustering for video indexing applications

This paper describes a method for automatically detecting human faces in generic video sequences. We employ an iterative algorithm in order to give a confidence measure for the presence or absence of faces within video shots. Skin colour filtering is carried out on a selected number of frames per video shot, followed by the application of shape and size heuristics. Finally, the remaining candidate regions are normalized and projected into an eigenspace, the reconstruction error being the measure of confidence for presence/absence of face. Following this, the confidence score for the entire video shot is calculated. In order to cluster extracted faces into a set of face classes, we employ an incremental procedure using a PCA-based dissimilarity measure in con-junction with spatio-temporal correlation. Experiments were carried out on a representative broadcast news test corpus

Classification of Humans into Ayurvedic Prakruti Types using Computer Vision

Ayurveda, a 5000 years old Indian medical science, believes that the universe and hence humans are made up of five elements namely ether, fire, water, earth, and air. The three Doshas (Tridosha) Vata, Pitta, and Kapha originated from the combinations of these elements. Every person has a unique combination of Tridosha elements contributing to a person’s ‘Prakruti’. Prakruti governs the physiological and psychological tendencies in all living beings as well as the way they interact with the environment. This balance influences their physiological features like the texture and colour of skin, hair, eyes, length of fingers, the shape of the palm, body frame, strength of digestion and many more as well as the psychological features like their nature (introverted, extroverted, calm, excitable, intense, laidback), and their reaction to stress and diseases. All these features are coded in the constituents at the time of a person’s creation and do not change throughout their lifetime. Ayurvedic doctors analyze the Prakruti of a person either by assessing the physical features manually and/or by examining the nature of their heartbeat (pulse). Based on this analysis, they diagnose, prevent and cure the disease in patients by prescribing precision medicine. This project focuses on identifying Prakruti of a person by analysing his facial features like hair, eyes, nose, lips and skin colour using facial recognition techniques in computer vision. This is the first of its kind research in this problem area that attempts to bring image processing into the domain of Ayurveda

A Novel Scheme for Intelligent Recognition of Pornographic Images

Harmful contents are rising in internet day by day and this motivates the essence of more research in fast and reliable obscene and immoral material filtering. Pornographic image recognition is an important component in each filtering system. In this paper, a new approach for detecting pornographic images is introduced. In this approach, two new features are suggested. These two features in combination with other simple traditional features provide decent difference between porn and non-porn images. In addition, we applied fuzzy integral based information fusion to combine MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) and NF (Neuro-Fuzzy) outputs. To test the proposed method, performance of system was evaluated over 18354 download images from internet. The attained precision was 93% in TP and 8% in FP on training dataset, and 87% and 5.5% on test dataset. Achieved results verify the performance of proposed system versus other related works

Fair comparison of skin detection approaches on publicly available datasets

Skin detection is the process of discriminating skin and non-skin regions in a digital image and it is widely used in several applications ranging from hand gesture analysis to track body parts and face detection. Skin detection is a challenging problem which has drawn extensive attention from the research community, nevertheless a fair comparison among approaches is very difficult due to the lack of a common benchmark and a unified testing protocol. In this work, we investigate the most recent researches in this field and we propose a fair comparison among approaches using several different datasets. The major contributions of this work are an exhaustive literature review of skin color detection approaches, a framework to evaluate and combine different skin detector approaches, whose source code is made freely available for future research, and an extensive experimental comparison among several recent methods which have also been used to define an ensemble that works well in many different problems. Experiments are carried out in 10 different datasets including more than 10000 labelled images: experimental results confirm that the best method here proposed obtains a very good performance with respect to other stand-alone approaches, without requiring ad hoc parameter tuning. A MATLAB version of the framework for testing and of the methods proposed in this paper will be freely available from https://github.com/LorisNann