How the Region of Interest Impacts Contact Free Heart Rate Estimation Algorithms

Abstract

The contact free camera-based estimation of human vital signs is more comfortable than the classical contact-based methods. Current methods suffer in realistic environments from e.g. occlusions by hair or glasses. Several approaches use complex methods to extract the pulse signals from the skin, but use basic geometric defined regions of the face, which ignore possible occlusions. In this paper we compare for the first time the influence of several region based methods and a newly proposed parameter-free skin segmentation approach on the performance of the heart rate estimation for nine different algorithms from the literature on two datasets with strong facial and head movement.