Xinyu Zhang

Xinyu Zhang, Weiyu Sun, Hao Lu et al.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a noninvasive technique that aims to capture subtle variations in facial pixels caused by changes in blood volume resulting from cardiac activities. Most existing unsupervised methods for rPPG tasks focus on the contrastive learning between samples while neglecting the inherent self-similar prior in physiological signals. In this paper, we propose a Self-Similarity Prior Distillation (SSPD) framework for unsupervised rPPG estimation, which capitalizes on the intrinsic self-similarity of cardiac activities. Specifically, we first introduce a physical-prior embedded augmentation technique to mitigate the effect of various types of noise. Then, we tailor a self-similarity-aware network to extract more reliable self-similar physiological features. Finally, we develop a hierarchical self-distillation paradigm to assist the network in disentangling self-similar physiological patterns from facial videos. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the unsupervised SSPD framework achieves comparable or even superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art supervised methods. Meanwhile, SSPD maintains the lowest inference time and computation cost among end-to-end models.

Weiyu Sun, Xinyu Zhang, Ying Chen et al.

Heart rate measuring based on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) plays an important role in health caring, which estimates heart rate from facial video in a non-contact, less-constrained way. End-to-end neural network is a main branch of rPPG-based heart rate estimation methods, whose trait is recovering rPPG signal containing sufficient heart rate message from original facial video directly. However, there exists some easily neglected problems on relevant datasets which thwarting the efficient training of end-to-end methods, such as uncertain temporal delay and indefinite envelope shape of label waves. Although many novel and powerful networks are proposed, hitherto there are no systematic research digging into these problems. In this paper, from perspective of common intrinsic rhythm periodical self-similarity results from cardiac activities, we propose a comprehensive methodology, Boost Your Heartbeat Estimation (BYHE), including new label representations, corresponding network adjustments and loss functions. BYHE can be easily grafted on current end-to-end network and boost its training efficiency. By applying our methodology, we can save tremendous time without conducting laborious handworks, such as label wave alignment which is necessary for previous end-to-end methods, and meanwhile enhance the utilization on datasets. According to our experiments, BYHE can leverage classical end-to-end network to reach competitive performance against those state-of-the-art methods on mostly used datasets. Such improvement indicates selecting perspicuous and efficient label representation is also a promising direction towards better remote physiological signal measurement.