Measuring heart rate traditionally requires special equipment and physical contact with the subject. Reliable non-contact and low-cost measurements are highly desirable for convenient and comfortable physiological self-assessment. Previous work has shown that consumer-grade cameras can provide useful signals for remote heart rate measurements. In this paper a simple and robust method of measuring the heart rate using low-cost webcam is proposed. Blood volume pulse is extracted by proper Region of Interest (ROI) and color channel selection from image sequences of human faces without complex computation. Heart rate is subsequently quantified by spectrum analysis. The method is successfully applied under natural lighting conditions. Results of experiments show that it takes less time, is much simpler, and has similar accuracy to the previously published and widely used method of Independent Component Analysis (ICA). Benefitting from non-contact, convenience, and low-costs, it provides great promise for popularization of home healthcare and can further be applied to biomedical research.
Non-contact and remote measurements of vital physical signals are important for reliable and comfortable physiological
self-assessment. In this paper, we provide a new video-based methodology for remote and fast measurements of vital
physical signals such as cardiac pulse and breathing rate. A webcam is used to track color video of a human face or wrist,
and a Photoplethysmography (PPG) technique is applied to perform the measurements of the vital signals. A novel
sequential blind signal extraction methodology is applied to the color video under normal lighting conditions, based on
correlation analysis between the green trace and the source signals. The approach is successfully applied in the
measurement of vital signals under the condition of different illuminating in which the target signal can also be found out
accurately. To assess the advantages, the measuring time of a large number of cases is recorded correctly. The
experimental results show that it only takes less than 30 seconds to measure the vital physical signals using presented
technique. The study indicates the proposed approach is feasible for PPG technique, which provides a way to study the
relationship of the signal for different ROI in future research.
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