Contactless heart rate estimation from face videos

Abstract

Heart Rate (HR) analysis has always been an area of interest not only for medical field investigators but also for researchers from variety of other fields. In the last decade, research focus has been shifted towards non-contact based systems. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis can be used not only to estimate the physical characteristics but also the emotional aspect of a subject. In this paper, HR is calculated from the face of a subject extracting photoplethysmography signal using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and filters (band-pass). A comparison is presented between two approaches, initially taking only cheeks area as region of interest (ROI) and then repeating the process with cheeks as well as nose area as ROI. A state-of-the-art dataset COHFACE is used to measure the percentage error and root mean square error (RMSE) of the system in verification. Final results show that using only cheeks area as ROI produces better result (%error 9.19 and RMSE 8.35).

Subject Classification:

• 6804

Keywords:

• Heart Rate
• FFT
• Cohface
• Blood volume pulse (BVP)