Motion artifacts reduction in cardiac pulse signal acquired from video imaging

Abstract

This study examines the possibility of remotely measuring the cardiac pulse activity of a patient, which could be an alternative technique to the classical method. This type of measurement is non-invasive. However, several limitations may deteriorate the accuracy of the results, including changes in ambient illumination, motion artifacts (MA) and other interferences that may occur through video recording. The paper in hand presents a new approach as a remedy for the aforementioned problem in cardiac pulse signals extracted from facial video recordings. Partitioning provides the basis for the presented MA reduction method; the acquired signals are partitioned into two sets for each second and every partition is shifted to the mean level and then all the partitions are recombined again into one signal, which is followed by low-pass filtering for enhancement. The proposed compared with ordinary pulse oximetry Photoplethysmographic (PPG) method. The resulted correlation coefficient was found (0.957) when calculated between the results of the proposed method and the ordinary one. Experiments were implemented using a common camera by creating a dataset from 11 subjects. The ease of implementation of this method with a simple that can be used to monitor the cardiac pulse rates in both home and the clinical environments.