Cepstral based heart rate estimation

Heart rate (HR) estimation is of crucial importance in human health evaluation and can be considered as valuable indicator of cardiovascular state. In this paper contact based system for heart rate is presented, where system for HR acquisition is consisted of a laptop and web camera. In such system heart rate variability (HRV) affects the changes in skin color of a fingertip while pressing the camera lens to make the full contact. HR value is estimated according to video sequence processing results. The proposed methodology uses local approach for feature extraction and cepstral based analysis. Experimental results are compared with referent pulse meter for healthy subjects. The average error of 5% is obtained.