Remote Heart Rate Measurement From Face Videos Under Realistic Situations

Xiaobai Li, Jie Chen, Guoying Zhao, Matti Pietikainen; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 4264-4271

Heart rate is an important indicator of people's physiological state. Recently, several papers reported methods to measure heart rate remotely from face videos. Those methods work well on stationary subjects under well controlled conditions, but their performance significantly degrades if the videos are recorded under more challenging conditions, specifically when subjects' motions and illumination variations are involved. We propose a framework which utilizes face tracking and Normalized Least Mean Square adaptive filtering methods to counter their influences. We test our framework on a large difficult and public database MAHNOB-HCI and demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms all previous methods. We also use our method for long term heart rate monitoring in a game evaluation scenario and achieve promising results.