Author(s)

Ruqiang Huang¹, Weihua Su^1*, Shiyue Zhang¹, Wei Qin²

¹National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology, Academy of Military Science of Chinese PLA, Beijing, China.
²Tianjin Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center, Tianjin, China.

Image photoplethysmography can realize low-cost and easy-to-operate non-contact heart rate detection from the facial video, and effectively overcome the limitations of traditional contact method in daily vital sign monitoring. However, it is hard to obtain more accurate heart rate detection values under the conditions of subject’s facial movement, weak ambient light intensity and long detection distance, etc. In this article, a non-contact heart rate detection method based on face tracking is proposed, which can effectively improve the accuracy of non-contact heart rate detection method in practical application. The corner tracker algorithm is used to track the human face to reduce the motion artifact caused by the movement of the subject’s face and enhance the use value of the signal. And the maximum ratio combining algorithm is used to weight the pixel space pulse wave signal in the facial region of interest to improve the pulse wave extraction accuracy. We analyzed the facial images collected under different experimental distances and action states. This proposed method significantly reduces the error rate compared with the independent component analysis method. After theoretical analysis and experimental verification, this method effectively reduces the error rate under different experimental variables and has good consistency with the heart rate value collected by the medical physiological vest. This method will help to improve the accuracy of non-contact heart rate detection in complex environments.

Heart Rate, Non-Contacting, Maximum Ratio Combining, Facial Video

Huang, R. , Su, W. , Zhang, S. and Qin, W. (2019) Non-Contact Method of Heart Rate Measurement Based on Facial Tracking. Journal of Computer and Communications, 7, 17-28. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2019.75002.