Saksham Bhutani

Pittsburgh, PA

USA

I am a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. I hold a background in electronics engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) in Vellore, India. At CMU, I have been working with several research labs including the Robotic Caregiving and Human Interaction (RCHI) Lab, Smart Sensing for Humans (SmaSH) Lab, Semantic Signals Lab, and WiTech Lab.

My research journey began under the guidance of Dr. Shunmuga Perumal at the Automotive Research Center at VIT, where I focused on developing perception models for autonomous vehicles operating in challenging environments with poor road infrastructure. I then interned at ETH Zurich, working on extracting PPG data from facial videos using computer vision, under the mentorship of Dr. Moe Elgendi and Dr. Carlo Menon. Following this, I worked as a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), collaborating with Dr. Vaibhav Katewa on deep learning-based Camera-LiDAR fusion techniques for mapping and navigation. Additionally, I served as a Visiting Researcher at Khalifa University, where I worked again with Dr. Moe Elgendi on developing intelligent biomedical devices.

I have also had the privilege of leading the Avionics and Software departments at Assailing Falcons, a team that achieved 3rd place Worldwide and 1st place in Asia in the SAE Aero Design Competition in 2021-2022. I also founded and chaired the VIT Amateur Radio Club (VARC). Currently, I am the Station Manager for the Carnegie Tech Radio Club (W3VC).

In my free time, I love building and flying drones, capturing breathtaking footage that you can find here. I’m also a licenced amateur radio operator in US and India (Callsigns: KD3AXL & VU3DTU) and an avid traveler. Per aspera ad astra 💫

news

May 20, 2025	My team won the Grand Prize in AI Agent Hackathon by Google DeepMind @ CMU.
Jan 21, 2025	Our paper “Vital signs-based healthcare kiosks for screening chronic and infectious diseases: a systematic review” has been published in Nature Communications Medicine. Check it out here.
Jan 01, 2025	I am starting Masters at Carnegie Mellon University.
Nov 01, 2024	I will be working as a Visiting Researcher at Khalifa University for few months with Prof. Moe Elgendi.
Nov 01, 2023	I received Pre-doctoral fellowship from the Kotak-IISc AI Center (KIAC).

selected publications

Journal
Preserving privacy and video quality through remote physiological signal removalw

Saksham Bhutani, Mohamed Elgendi, and Carlo Menon

Communications Engineering, 2025

Abs Bib HTML

The revolutionary remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) technique has enabled intelligent devices to estimate physiological parameters with remarkable accuracy. However, the continuous and surreptitious recording of individuals by these devices and the collecting of sensitive health data without users’ knowledge or consent raise serious privacy concerns. Here we explore frugal methods for modifying facial videos to conceal physiological signals while maintaining image quality. Eleven lightweight modification methods, including blurring operations, additive noises, and time-averaging techniques, were evaluated using five different rPPG techniques across four activities: rest, talking, head rotation, and gym. These rPPG methods require minimal computational resources, enabling real-time implementation on low-compute devices. Our results indicate that the time-averaging sliding frame method achieved the greatest balance between preserving the information within the frame and inducing a heart rate error, with an average error of 22 beats per minute (bpm). Further, the facial region of interest was found to be the most effective and to offer the best trade-off between bpm errors and information loss.
@article{bhutani2025privacy, title = {Preserving privacy and video quality through remote physiological signal removalw}, author = {Bhutani, Saksham and Elgendi, Mohamed and Menon, Carlo}, journal = {Communications Engineering}, volume = {4}, number = {1}, pages = {66}, year = {2025}, publisher = {Nature Publishing Group UK London}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s44172-025-00363-z}, dimensions = {true}, }