We propose a multiple initialization based spectral peak tracking (MISPT) technique for heart rate monitoring from
photoplethysmography (PPG) signal.MISPT is applied on the PPG signal after removing the motion artifact using an adaptive noise cancellation filter. MISPT yields several estimates of the heart rate trajectory from the spectrogram of the denoised PPG signal which are finally combined using a novel measure called
trajectory strength. Multiple initializations help in correcting
erroneous heart rate trajectories unlike the typical SPT which uses only single initialization. Experiments on the PPG data from 12 subjects recorded during intensive physical exercise show that
the MISPT based heart rate monitoring indeed yields a better heart rate estimate compared to the SPT with single initialization. On the 12 datasets MISPT results in an average absolute error of 1.11 BPM which is lower than 1.28 BPM obtained by the state-of-the-art online heart rate monitoring algorithm.