Heart rate estimation from facial videos using nonlinear mode decomposition and improved consistency check

Demirezen H., Eroğlu Erdem Ç.

SIGNAL IMAGE AND VIDEO PROCESSING, vol.15, no.7, pp.1415-1423, 2021 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 15 Issue: 7
  • Publication Date: 2021
  • Doi Number: 10.1007/s11760-021-01873-x
  • Journal Name: SIGNAL IMAGE AND VIDEO PROCESSING
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Compendex, INSPEC, zbMATH
  • Page Numbers: pp.1415-1423
  • Keywords: Heart rate estimation, Photoplethysmography, Nonlinear mode decomposition, NMD, Remote PPG, rPPG, PPG, Imaging PPG, iPPG, PULSE-RATE, NONCONTACT
  • Marmara University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a non-contact and noninvasive way of measuring human physiological signals such as the heart rate using the subtle color changes of skin regions. Since the face of a person is generally visible, facial videos can be used for estimating the heart rate remotely. The rigid and non-rigid motions of the face and illumination variations are the main challenges that affect the accuracy of heart rate estimation. In this paper, we present a new method for estimating the heart rate of a person from the skin region of the facial video using nonlinear mode decomposition (NMD), which is a recently proposed blind source separation method and has been shown to be more robust to noise. We also propose a new method (history-based consistency check-HBCC) for selecting the best heart rate candidate after decomposition by minimizing a temporal cost function. Experiments on two datasets show that the proposed method (rPPG-NMD) achieves promising results as compared to several the state-of-the-art methods for rPPG-based heart rate estimation.