Face Detection for Pulse Rate Measurement

Monitoring vital signals, including pulse rate is a crucial process to detect cardiovascular disorders and body liveness. Some of the clinically used techniques might cause irritation or discomfort for patients. This paper presents a contactless, non-invasive camera-based method of extracting pulse rate from a video stream without attaching electrodes to the skin. The introduced method is a colour-based approach that can estimate heart rate through amplifying subtle changes in skin colour which caused by blood circulation. When evaluated on 7 subjects, this approach reported similar heart rates comparing to a reference oximeter system, however, this method is sensitive to motion artefact and light noise.