Video-Based Heart Rate Measurement Against Uneven Illuminations Using Multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis

Spatially uneven illuminations are the dominant interference of video-based heart rate (HR) screening for cooperated subjects in a telehealth service. In this letter, a remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) method is introduced to stably extract pulsatile signals against uneven facial illuminations based on the multivariate singular spectrum analysis (MSSA). This method first divides the facial skins into multiple patches, where the hue channels resistant to light intensity variations are prepared from selected optimal patches. Considering the spatial correlations of heartbeats, the hue signals are then decomposed using the MSSA to reconstruct pulses. Finally, the HR is determined as the one with the highest ratio of energy around the dominant frequency from the first group of MSSA reconstructed signals. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the in-house BSIPL-rPPG database and the public COHFACE database, where the correlation coefficients of the estimated HRs achieve 0.95 and 0.98, respectively, outperforming those of the comparison methods.