Can contact-free measurement of heartbeat signal be used in forensics?

Biometrics and soft biometrics characteristics are of great importance in forensics applications for identifying criminals and law enforcement. Developing new biometrics and soft biometrics are therefore of interest of many applications, among them forensics. Heartbeat signals have been previously used as biometrics, but they have been measured using contact-based sensors. This paper extracts heartbeat signals, using a contact-free method by a simple webcam. The extracted signals in this case are not as precise as those that can be extracted using contact-based sensors. However, the contact-free extracted heartbeat signals are shown in this paper to have some potentials to be used as soft biometrics. Promising experimental results on a public database, have shown that utilizing these signals can improve the accuracy of spoofing detection in a face recognition system.