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Improvements in remote video based estimation of heart rate variability using the Welch FFT method

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Abstract

Non-contact heart rate and heart rate variability measurements have applications in healthcare and affective computing. Recently, a system utilizing a five-band camera (RGBCO: red, green, blue, cyan, orange) was proposed, and shown to improve both remote measurement of heart rate and heart rate variability over an RGB camera. In this paper, we propose an improved method for video-based estimation of heart rate variability. We introduce three advancements over previous work utilizing five-band cameras: (1) an adaptive non-rectangular region of interest identified using automatically detected facial feature points, (2) improved peak detection within the blood volume pulse (BVP) signal, and (3) improved HRV calculation using the Welch periodogram. We apply our method to a test dataset of subjects at rest and under cognitive stress and show qualitative improvements in the stability of HRV spectrogram estimation. Although we evaluate our method using a five-band camera, the method could be applied to video recorded with any camera.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Advanced Integration Science, Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho, Inage-Ku, Chiba, 263-8522, Japan

    Munenori Fukunishi & Norimichi Tsumura

  2. Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA

    Daniel Mcduff

Authors
  1. Munenori Fukunishi
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  2. Daniel Mcduff
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  3. Norimichi Tsumura
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Correspondence to Munenori Fukunishi.

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Fukunishi, M., Mcduff, D. & Tsumura, N. Improvements in remote video based estimation of heart rate variability using the Welch FFT method. Artif Life Robotics 23, 15–22 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-017-0393-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-017-0393-y

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