Facial blood vessels activity in drunk persons using thermal infrared

In this work, the activity of the facial blood vessels of drunk persons is studied using thermal infrared images. Nonlinear anisotropic diffusion is applied to enhance the vessels on the images and after that top-hat transformation is used for isolating them from the rest information on the face. Simple thresholding is applied to raise the more active vessels. Registration procedures are employed to easily compare the vessel activity on the face of the drunk person with that on the sober person. In drunk persons, vessels around nose and eyes as well as on the forehead become more active. This work constitutes a preliminary study, which aims at qualitative and not quantitative results. Basically, the restricted number of the 20 persons that participated in the experiment is not considered adequate for statistical inference.