Plenty of sources suggest it is:

https://github.com/giladoved/webcam-heart-rate-monitor

https://medium.com/dev-genius/remote-heart-rate-detection-us...

The Reddit comments on that second one have examples of people doing it with low quality webcams: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/llnv93/remote_...

It's honestly amazing that this is doable.

MIT was able to reconstruct voice by filming a bag of chips on a 60FPS camera. I would hesitate to say how much information can leak through.

https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vib...

It is, I've done it live on a laptop and via the front camera of a phone. I actually wrote this thing twice, once in Swift a few years back, and then again in Python more recently because I wanted to remember the details of how to do it. Since a few people seem surprised this is feasible maybe it's worth posting the code somewhere.

You will be surprised of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of opencv.calcOpticalFlowPyrLK

It is, but there's a lot of noise on top of it (in fact, the noise is kind of necessary to avoid it being 'flattened out' and disappearing). The fact that it covers a lot pixels and is relatively low bandwidth is what allows for this kind of magic trick.

It totally is. Look for motion-magnification in the literature for the start of the field, and then remote PPG for more recent work.

Sure it is. Smart watches even do it using the simplest possible “camera” (an LED).

You can do it with infrared and webcams see some of it, but I'm not sure if they're sensitive enough for that.

I have seen apps that use the principle for HRV. Finger pushed on phone cam.

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