During the last decade the human body detection and tracking has been a very extensive research eld within the computer vision. There are many potential applications of people tracking such as security-monitoring, anthropomorphic analysis or biometrics. In this thesis we present an algorithm and related software to detect human bodies in an indoor environment. It is part of a wider project which aims to estimate the human height. The purposed algorithm performs in real-time to detect people. The algorithm is developed using the free OpenCV library in C++ programming language. As far as this algorithm is rst part of a wider system, our software gives two outputs. The principal one is the coordinates of the detected object. With the coordinates, the aforementioned measuring system will be able to calculate the height by itself. The other output is the video sequence with the detected person bounded by a rectangle, wich provides visual feedback to the user. This software is able to communicate with Matlab Engine. It is important since the subsequent height estimation system works in Matlab®.