Non-contact heart rate measurement from face video based on group sparse representation

Non-contact heart rate measurement based on face video is rapidly developed due to its comfort and wide application. However, it is difficult to extract the pulse signals for non-contact heart rate measurement due to the various interference factors, such as illumination variation, head motion and face expression. In this paper, we propose group sparse representation to reconstruct the pulse signals, then estimate the heart rate based on the fact that the real heart rate is consistent at the same time from different sub-regions. Specifically, we formulate the reconstruction of pulse signals as group sparse representation problem and require the raw signals of all the sub-regions to be similar sparse representation. Firstly, we use the face detection algorithm to obtain the region of interest (ROI) and divide it into sub-regions, followed by the distortion compensation of color signals from different sub-regions. Then we extract the sub-region chrominance signals and select the high-quality chrominance signals to construct the raw pulse signals matrix. After that, we construct a mixed pulse dictionary containing discrete cosine bases and wavelet bases considering the periodicity and pulsatility of the pulse signals. Finally, we conduct group sparse representation to reconstruct the pulse signals and estimate the heart rate via spectral analysis based on the reconstructed pulse signals. Experimental results on three public datasets show that this method outperforms most existing heart rate measurement methods.