Adaptive Pulsatile Plane for Robust Noncontact Heart Rate Monitoring

This article proposes a novel approach to replace the fixed projection planes existed in the previous researches to reduce motion artifacts obtained from the human face by a normal webcam for monitoring heart rate in a real-time fashion. The novel projection plane is adaptively changed with the light intensity change to eliminate the color distortion induced by motion. In this article, the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation Deeplabv3+ is implemented to segment the skin pixels from the facial region that is detected by several trackers (Boosting, MIL, TLD, Median Flow, Mosse, and CSRT) to boost the computational time compared to the conventional face detection by Haar-Like features. Image and digital signal processing techniques are also applied to eliminate possible noise for obtaining a clean pulse signal. The proposed approach is compared with other existing approaches (Green, PCA, Chrom, and POS) in multiple challenges. From the experiments conducted, the Deeplabv3+ outperforms the conventional K-means for different kinds of skin segmentation. Moreover, the proposed approach is quite robust and stable in the stationary case (with the accuracy 96%), dim-lighting environment and the long-distance up to 4-m away without zooming in camera. Besides, multiple head-movement simulations and motions of fitness are conquered by the APP approach as shown in the experiments. Thus, it can be concluded that the proposed approach is applicable to surveillance or healthcare applications.