Non-contact video-based estimation of heart rate variability spectrogram from hemoglobin composition

Non-contact HR measurement is becoming an active research area. Recently, remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) measurement based on simple skin optics model has been proposed and shown to be effective. In this paper, we propose an accurate remote observation of the heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) based on hemoglobin component estimation which is based on a detailed skin optics model. We perform experiments to measure subjects at rest and under cognitive stress with the proposed method putting a polarized filter in front of the camera to evaluate the principle of the framework. From the results of the experiments, the proposed method shows a high correlation with the electrocardiograph (ECG) which is assumed as the ground truth. We also evaluate the proposed method without putting any polarized filter and confirm the usefulness for the remote observation of HRV which requires accurate detection of HR. © 2017, ISAROB.