Non-contact video based heart rate estimation has great various potential in areas such as medical, health care, and affective computing. Recently, the methods using a digital camera for remote heart rate (HR) measurement are widely spread. However, the accuracy of these methods are not sufficient enough to calculate heart rate variability (HRV) accurately. If HRV are measured with high accuracy, we can visualize the sympathetic nerve system by calculating heart rate variability spectrogram (HRVS). In this paper, we propose a method of HR and HRV spectrogram estimation by analyzing extracted hemoglobin concentration from facial color images. Our method does not require any special camera. Furthermore, it is possible to have a stable presumption even under the ambient light sources. As a result, we could obtain 99% accuracy of HR and HRV spectrogram with the same accuracy electrocardiogram. Therefore we succeeded to identify whether participants were relaxed or stressed using conventional DSLR camera.
Kouki Kurita, Taku Yonezawa, Mai Kuroshima, Norimichi Tsumura, "Non-Contact Video Based Estimation for Heart Rate Variability Spectrogram using Ambient Light by Extracting Hemoglobin Information" in Proc. IS&T 23rd Color and Imaging Conf., 2015, pp 207 - 211, https://doi.org/10.2352/CIC.2015.23.1.art00037