VideoPulse: Neonatal heart rate and peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (SpO2) estimation from contact free video

TL;DR

VideoPulse introduces a contact-free method using facial video to accurately estimate neonatal heart rate and SpO2, facilitating non-invasive monitoring in neonatal care with promising results across diverse datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents a new neonatal dataset and an end-to-end pipeline for estimating vital signs from facial videos, demonstrating high accuracy and robustness.

Findings

Heart rate MAE of 2.97 bpm with 2-second windows

SpO2 MAE of 1.69 percent on the dataset

Effective cross-dataset generalization and fine-tuning results

Abstract

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contact free monitoring of vital signs and is especially valuable for neonates, since conventional methods often require sustained skin contact with adhesive probes that can irritate fragile skin and increase infection control burden. We present VideoPulse, a neonatal dataset and an end to end pipeline that estimates neonatal heart rate and peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (SpO2) from facial video. VideoPulse contains 157 recordings totaling 2.6 hours from 52 neonates with diverse face orientations. Our pipeline performs face alignment and artifact aware supervision using denoised pulse oximeter signals, then applies 3D CNN backbones for heart rate and SpO2 regression with label distribution smoothing and weighted regression for SpO2. Predictions are produced in 2 second windows. On the NBHR neonatal dataset, we obtain heart rate MAE 2.97 bpm using 2 second windows (2.80 bpm at 6 second windows) and SpO2 MAE 1.69 percent. Under cross dataset evaluation, the NBHR trained heart rate model attains 5.34 bpm MAE on VideoPulse, and fine tuning an NBHR pretrained SpO2 model on VideoPulse yields MAE 1.68 percent. These results indicate that short unaligned neonatal video segments can support accurate heart rate and SpO2 estimation, enabling low cost non invasive monitoring in neonatal intensive care.