Vascular pattern localization via temporal signature

Accurate vascular pattern localization has many applications in the diverse scientific and application domains. For example, vascular patterns not only have been widely used as a biometric-based human identification method that is inexpensive, secure and easy to use, but also have produced more accurate heart-rate estimation using conventional RGB camera by defining regions of interest along the vascular patterns instead of the entire exposed skin area. In addition, extracting temporal activity along vascular patterns can further enable targeted monitoring of other physiological parameters, such as blood flow and blood pulse transition time. This paper presents a method for robust and accurate vascular pattern localization using conventional RGB imaging systems. Our approach overcomes current limitations of systems that use still RGB images for vascular pathway localization - which produce low contrast between areas of vascular patterns and skin tissues and are sensitive to skin color variations - by capturing the temporal differences between these two areas from RGB videos.