Assessment of Deep Learning-based Heart Rate Estimation using Remote Photoplethysmography under Different Illuminations

TL;DR

This paper evaluates deep learning-based heart rate estimation from remote photoplethysmography under different lighting conditions, introduces a new dataset, and compares traditional and deep learning methods, highlighting the impact of illumination on accuracy.

Contribution

It presents the BH-rPPG dataset with varied illumination conditions, benchmarks multiple methods, and explores brightness augmentation to improve deep learning robustness.

Findings

Traditional methods are more resistant to illumination changes.

Physnet performs best among deep learning methods under medium illumination.

Brightness augmentation improves deep learning model robustness to lighting variations.

Abstract

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) monitors heart rate without requiring physical contact, which allows for a wide variety of applications. Deep learning-based rPPG have demonstrated superior performance over the traditional approaches in controlled context. However, the lighting situation in indoor space is typically complex, with uneven light distribution and frequent variations in illumination. It lacks a fair comparison of different methods under different illuminations using the same dataset. In this paper, we present a public dataset, namely the BH-rPPG dataset, which contains data from thirty five subjects under three illuminations: low, medium, and high illumination. We also provide the ground truth heart rate measured by an oximeter. We evaluate the performance of three deep learning-based methods (Deepphys, rPPGNet, and Physnet) to that of four traditional methods (CHROM, GREEN, ICA, and POS) using two public datasets: the UBFC-rPPG dataset and the BH-rPPG dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that traditional methods are generally more resistant to fluctuating illuminations. We found that the Physnet achieves lowest mean absolute error (MAE) among deep learning-based method under medium illumination, whereas the CHROM achieves 1.04 beats per minute (BPM), outperforming the Physnet by 80$\%$. Additionally, we investigate potential methods for improving performance of deep learning-based methods. We find that brightness augmentation make model more robust to variation illumination. These findings suggest that while developing deep learning-based heart rate estimation algorithms, illumination variation should be taken into account. This work serves as a benchmark for rPPG performance evaluation and it opens a pathway for future investigation into deep learning-based rPPG under illumination variations.