MediaPipe update 2023 Please note that MediaPipe has seen major changes in 2023 and now offers a redesigned API. The code in this posts still works as of mediapipe==0.10.7. Check out this post for more details on the new API. With every heartbeat, the color of your skin changes slightly. While this effect is invisible to the human eye, a normal camera is able to pick up these tiny differences.

MediaPipe update 2023 Please note that MediaPipe has seen major changes in 2023 and now offers a redesigned API. The code in this posts still works as of mediapipe==0.10.7. Check out this post for more details on the new API. In 2019, Google open-sourced MediaPipe, a set of machine learning-based solutions for a variety of computer vision problems. Although currently still in alpha, the ease of use, speed and performance of the provided pretrained models is very impressive.

The human eye is an amazing and powerful organ. However, humans are not good at spotting small changes in color or intensity. By contrast, cameras obtain a numeric representation of a scene with incredibly high color resolution. A camera can therefore be used to detect tiny differences in successive video frames in order to gain meaningful information. Using some basic tools from computer vision and signal processing, it is even possible to measure the heart rate of a person sitting in front of a regular webcam.