subtle changes to the skin color of the face and also
generates some subtle head motions. These motions
are not usually visible to naked eyes but they can be
viewed by techniques like, for example, Eulerian
video magnification (Wu, 2012). These periodic
changes to the skin colors and head motions are then
utilized to measure heartbeat rate. For example, in
(Poh, 2010) periodic changes in the skin color of the
face has been used for this purpose. In this system
(Poh, 2010) face image of the subject is first found,
by a simple camera. Then, it is separated into its
colour channels and each channel is tracked
independently. For each of these tracked colour
channels, a trajectory is found. Then, all the
trajectories are fed to an Independent Component
Analysis (ICA) algorithm. The output of ICA,
presents independents sources that have caused
changes to the skin colour of the face. Then, it is
assumed that the most periodic output of ICA should
be generated by the most periodic source that is
present on the face, i.e., heartbeat. This system is
effective, but it suffers from sensitivity to skin color
and noise. It means, if the skin is not detected
properly, or if the captured facial video is noisy, the
system does not provide accurate results.
To overcome the sensitivity to noise and skin
detection of system (Poh, 2010), very recently in
(Balakrishnan, 2013) a motion-based contactless
system for measuring heartbeat rate was introduced.
As mentioned above, this method is based on the
fact that periodic circulation of the blood from the
heart to the body, including the head through the
aorta and carotid arteries, causes the head to move in
a cyclic motion (Wu, 2012). Similar to (Poh, 2010),
this system also uses a simple camera for recording
facial images of patients. Having detected the face,
they extracted vertical component of head motion by
tracking feature points, and generate some
trajectories for each feature point. These trajectories
are then filtered by a Butterworth filter to remove
the irrelevant frequencies. Next on the contrary
(Poh, 2010) they use Principle Component Analysis
(PCA) (instead of ICA) to decompose the filtered
trajectories into a set of source signals. Then, they
use the same assumption as (Poh, 2010), that the
most periodic signal is generated by the most
periodic source of the motion that is present in the
face, i.e., by heartbeat. To find the periodicity of the
outputs of PCA, they apply Fast Fourier Transform
(FFT) to the trajectories, and use the percentage of
total spectral power of the signal accounted for by
the frequency with the maximal power and its first
harmonic (Balakrishnan, 2013).
This method gives reasonable results when the
face is frontal and does not move. Our experiment
shows that involuntary motion and facial expression
causes dramatic effect on the accuracy of this
system. Furthermore, as mentioned above, this
system is based on using the frequency with
maximal power as the first harmonic of the
estimated heartbeat rate. But, this assumption is not
always true, especially when the facial expression is
changing. The proposed system in this paper
improves the system of (Balakrishnan, 2013) by
replacing the FFT with a Discrete Cosine Transform
(DCT). Furthermore, we show that involving a
moving average filter before the Butterworth filter
improves the results. It is shown that the proposed
system outperforms the system of (Balakrishnan,
2013), significantly.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
The clear problem statement and the contributions of
the proposed system are given in the next section.
Section 3 explains the employed methodology of the
proposed system. The experimental results are
reported in Section 4. Finally, the paper is concluded
in Section 5.
2 PROBLEM STATEMENT AND
MAIN CONTRIBUTION
The proposed system in this paper develops a vision-
based contactless algorithm for heartbeat rate
measurement using the assumption that periodic
blood circulation by the heart to the head generates
subtle periodic motion on the face. The proposed
system is based on the very recent work of
(Balakrishnan, 2013), but it advances this work by:
1) Replacing the FFT of the system of
(Balakrishnan, 2013) by a DCT, and
2) Using a moving average filter before the
Butterworth filter that is employed in
(Balakrishnan, 2013).
The proposed modifications are simple, but are
shown to be very effective. The results of the
proposed system are:
1) More correct compared to the results of the
system of (Balakrishnan, 2013) when they are
compared to the ground truth data.
2) More robust than the results of the system of
(Balakrishnan, 2013) when the face is moving or
facial expression is changing.
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