Deep Pulse-Signal Magnification for remote Heart Rate Estimation in Compressed Videos

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel pulse-signal magnification method to improve remote heart rate estimation from compressed videos, maintaining high accuracy despite compression artifacts.

Contribution

The paper proposes a pulse-signal magnification transformation that enhances rPPG signals in compressed videos, addressing a key challenge in remote heart rate estimation.

Findings

Effective in various compression scenarios

Outperforms existing methods on multiple datasets

Robust across different video qualities

Abstract

Recent advancements in data-driven approaches for remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) have significantly improved the accuracy of remote heart rate estimation. However, the performance of such approaches worsens considerably under video compression, which is nevertheless necessary to store and transmit video data efficiently. In this paper, we present a novel approach to address the impact of video compression on rPPG estimation, which leverages a pulse-signal magnification transformation to adapt compressed videos to an uncompressed data domain in which the rPPG signal is magnified. We validate the effectiveness of our model by exhaustive evaluations on two publicly available datasets, UCLA-rPPG and UBFC-rPPG, employing both intra- and cross-database performance at several compression rates. Additionally, we assess the robustness of our approach on two additional highly compressed and widely-used datasets, MAHNOB-HCI and COHFACE, which reveal outstanding heart rate estimation results.