The paper that this is based on is also pretty fascinating: Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/
Well, in my opinion, a patent like this is well deserved. I could be wrong, but the researchers have spent significant time on it and have discovered/invented something really unique.
that's the tragedy of it. something cool is invented and now it'll be fenced off and buried for 25 years in all likelihood, and/or becomes part of a big patent portfolio.
No, a patent implies that you publicly disclose the knowledge behind your discovery immediately, in exchange for the property of this knowledge being guaranteed† to be yours for a limited time, and its use guaranteed to become free when this time runs out.
The alternative is not to disclose it, with the risk for you that nobody will reverse engineer or discover by themselves, or the risk for everyone else that this knowledge could be lost forever.
† pending approval, and unless successfully challenged in court (where the patent applies).
ICBW, but no, I don't think it does, except it perhaps a narrow set of circumstances.
Compulsory Licensing[1] is maybe what you're thinking of, but from what I can tell seems to apply mostly to drug patents, or things {the,a} government wants from you. It has a wider applicability in copyrighted forms of IP, I believe.
Patents that are part of some organised standard are often required to be placed under 'FRAND[2] (Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory)' compulsory licences to allow for interoperability whilst still allowing the patent holder to receive (reasonable) royalties if they wish.
It would be more correct to say that "patents that their owners contribute to some organised standard ..."
If I add a patented process to an important standard, but I don't own the patents, you still don't get those patents just because they are part of some important standard.
They only grant the right to exclude others from doing something.
So if i own a patent on X, it gives me the right to prevent others from doing X.
Even if i license my patent on X to you, it does not necessarily mean you can do X, because doing X may also require other patents that my patent is an extension of.
In other words:
Imagine we have patented processes, each building on the last.
Patent A covers doing thing one
Patent B covers doing thing one, then thing two
Patent C covers doing thing one, then thing two, then thing three.
Granting you only the right to perform patent C does not enable you to perform the process described by patent C, you'd still need licenses for patent B and patent A to do that.
Give it a video feed from a political debate and live-tweet the politicians pulse on different topics. I foresee a future of politicians sporting bangs and bob cuts.
This would probably be a bad metric though, you might accidentally be selecting for sociopathic traits or something which might be undesirable in a politician.
I haven't downloaded this yet, but I certainly will. If it is accurate and reasonably precise (yea, what does that mean?), I'd like to have it running in the background, gathering data as I work, while also gathering statistics about my work. I, like most of the people here, am a productivity junky. I wonder if a heightened pulse could indicate mounting stress, which necessitates a break. Sure, I have other machinery that could indicate mounting stress -- like my mind -- but the quantitative, off-loaded metric shifts responsibility in a way that could be helpful. "I'm not really stressed," says me to my brain. "No, your heart rate is quite high," says my computer to me.
Interesting. There was a Rock Health company that created an app using this technology. The app is called Cardiio.
I know the founders were from MIT/Harvard but can't recall if they were the same people who conducted this research.
It'll be interesting to see how robust that is against different levels of alertness. I clicked through but couldn't see any info on using it on tired people - and your EEG changes significantly with alertness level. Depends on what they're measuring though.
The duration of the pulse is much shorter than the beat, though. Should still be visible at that framerate, just noting that pulses aren't sinewaves :)
I dont believe so. Since the heart rate could be much higher, it would alias, and the camera wouldn't be able to tell the difference between normal heart rate and low heart rate.
This is what I suspect could happen, with two possible heart rates matching the same set of samples:
If your heart rate is higher than 3bps, you won't be sitting patiently in front of a webcam waiting for lock-on.
Sedentary (calm, sitting) heartrates go from ~40bpm for extremely fit people to ~90-100 for particularly unfit people. Higher than 100 is unusual for sedentary people, and works out to ~ 1.5bps. The waveforms in the pulse itself (note pulse, not ECG, which has much faster elements) speed up with the pulse, but I would estimate (could be wrong) that your highest frequency significant elements would be around 5hz for a 1.5bps heartrate.
Your example from wikimedia has a signal that is ten times faster than the sample rate - and the nyquist limit says this would be aliased. My back-of-the-envelope calcs above suggest a 5Hz signal at the high end against a 15Hz sampling at the low end, which is a ratio of 3:1, which is enough to satisfy nyquist.
Disclaimer: I am an ex-neuro tech and ex-sleep tech. I am used to sticking electrodes onto people and studying them. The exact form of the pulse wasn't big in my area, so maybe a cardio tech can chime in and correct me.
when I have some time and can dig out my pulse oximeter, I'll see if I can hack it in for comparison. Based on trying to take my pulse manually it certainly seemed in the ballpark, and got even better/stronger locked results from using my thumb ~5-10cm from the camera.
It seems quite sensitive to image saturation for losing lock though.
On each heartbeat, blood is pushed and makes the skin nearly unperceivably redder. By watching for and tracking this subtle change, you can extract a heartbeat.
Look at the absorption spectra at http://omlc.ogi.edu/spectra/hemoglobin/index.html. Green is ~510nm, red is ~650nm, blue is ~475nm. The difference between the absorption of Hb and HbO2 in the red range is the reason why pulse oximeters use red. In this case, we don't care about differentiating oxy- vs. deoxy-hemoglobin, we just care about the total absorption. Since more light is absorbed at green than at red, it will show more of an effect with pulse.
I am not confident in this explanation, and still don't know why green over blue.
> I am not confident in this explanation, and still don't know why green over blue.
I'm not sure either, but I can tell you that if you examine digitized (RGB) 35mm film -- across all 35mm film stocks -- the blue channel is the most noisy.
So my guess is: He might have chosen green over blue due to the blue channel being noisier.
From Wikipedia on the Bayer Filter:
"Bryce Bayer's patent (U.S. Patent No. 3,971,065) in 1976 called the green photosensors luminance-sensitive elements and the red and blue ones chrominance-sensitive elements. He used twice as many green elements as red or blue to mimic the physiology of the human eye. The luminance perception of the human retina uses M and L cone cells combined, during daylight vision, which are most sensitive to green light."
The Foveon sensor does sample RGB at every pixel by using 3 layers, but it is only used in a few cameras.
