Recent studies showed that subtle changes in human’s face color due to the heartbeat can be captured by digital video recorders. Most work focused on still/rest cases or those with relatively small motions. In this work, we propose a heart-rate monitoring method for fitness exercise videos. We focus on building a highly precise motion compensation scheme with the help of the optical flow, and use motion information as a cue to adaptively remove ambiguous frequency components for improving the heart rates estimates. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve highly precise estimation with an average error of 1.1 beats per minute (BPM) or 0.58% in relative error.

Demo video URL (YouTube)
1. (Treadmill) https://youtu.be/9njZ1fBq26g
2. (Elliptical Machine) https://youtu.be/HecxAUOnDe0

View and Download the Paper to Learn More: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2017.8296632