This is a simple implementation of rPPG, a way to measure heart rate without skin contact. It uses a video recording or live feed of the face to analyse subtle changes in skin color.
Here's how it works:
- The face is detected and continuously tracked
- Signal series is obtained by determining the facial color in every frame
- Heart rate is estimated using frequency analysis and filtering of the series
If you are interested in the specifics, feel free to have a read of our publications on the topic:
- Remote Photoplethysmography: Evaluation of Contactless Heart Rate Measurement in an Information Systems Setting
- Using Contactless Heart Rate Measurements for Real-Time Assessment of Affective States
- Remote heart rate measurement using low-cost RGB face video: A technical literature review
The following libraries are required to run Heartbeat:
They must be installed on the system such that headers and libraries are found on the compiler's standard search path.
Compile the source code for your system, providing a number of required linker flags. This works with opencv 3.4.1 on macOS:
$ g++ -std=c++11 -lopencv_core -lopencv_highgui -lopencv_imgcodecs -lopencv_imgproc -lopencv_objdetect -lopencv_video -lopencv_videoio -lavcodec Heartbeat.cpp opencv.cpp RPPG.cpp Baseline.cpp -o HeartbeatAlternative compilation for Ubuntu. Works with opencv 3.1:
$ g++ -std=c++11 Heartbeat.cpp opencv.cpp RPPG.cpp Baseline.cpp `pkg-config --cflags --libs opencv` -o HeartbeatGPL-3.0