Real Time Heart Rate Monitoring from Facial RGB Color Video using Webcam

Heart Rate (HR) is one of the most important Physiological parameter and a vital indicator of people’s physiological state and is therefore important to monitor. Monitoring of HR often involves high costs and complex application of sensors and sensor systems. Research progressing during last decade focuses more on noncontact based systems which are simple, low-cost and comfortable to use. Still most of the noncontact based systems are fit for lab environments in offline situation but needs to progress considerably before they can be applied in real time applications. This paper presents a real time HR monitoring method using a webcam of a laptop computer. The heart rate is obtained through facial skin color variation caused by blood circulation. Three different signal processing methods such as Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) have been applied on the color channels in video recordings and the blood volume pulse (BVP) is extracted from the facial regions. HR is subsequently quantified and compared to corresponding reference measurements. The obtained results show that there is a high degrees of agreement between the proposed experiments and reference measurements. This technology has significant potential for advancing personal health care and telemedicine. Further improvements of the proposed algorithm considering environmental illumination and movement can be very useful in many real time applications such as driver monitoring.