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The driver's physiological status has enormous value to public traffic safety and cannot be ignored nowadays. In addition, heart rate (HR) is one of the most important indicators of human's health status. When detecting the driver's HR, using traditional contact-type devices might bring about the driver's distraction or discomfort. On the contrary, the remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) technique is a better way to monitor a driver's HR in vehicle applications simply by using a web-camera without interfering the driver. Most of the rPPG studies intended to reduce the interference caused by facial motion or luminance changes in the indoor or controlled scenario, but there are relatively fewer discussions on outdoor scenarios. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to enhance the rPPG technique to make it suitable for the outdoor driving scenarios and for monitoring the driver's HR in different weather conditions, including daytime and nighttime. We first utilize artificial neural network (ANN) and train multiple personalized ANN models for each driver. For predicting the drivers' HR beat more precisely, we propose the approach, adaptive neural network model selection (ANNMS), which adaptively selects a personalized ANN model based on different noise conditions. Our algorithm eliminates the effect of noises caused by the variations of facial luminance in eight outdoor driving scenarios. The proposed driver's HR beat monitoring system has been evaluated against the state-of-the-art rPPG techniques that are Chrominance signal-based (CHRO) and k-nearest neighbors-based (kNN) algorithms. Compared with the CHRO and kNN algorithms, the ANNMS reduces the mean absolute error from 14.71 bpm (CHRO) and 9.91 (kNN) to 4.51 bpm (ANNMS) and enhances the success-rate-10, the probability in which the absolute error is below 10 bpm, from 44.1% (CHRO) and 56.3% (kNN) to 91.5% (ANNMS).

Atrial fibrillation (AF) has been proven highly correlated to stroke; more than 43 million people suffer from AF worldwide. However, most of these patients are unaware of their disease. There is no convenient tool by which to conduct a comprehensive screening to identify asymptomatic AF patients. Hence, we provide a non-contact AF detection approach based on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG). We address motion disturbance, the most challenging issue in rPPG technology, with the NR-Net, ATT-Net, and SQ-Mask modules. NR-Net is designed to eliminate motion noise with a CNN model, and ATT-Net and SQ-Mask utilize channel-wise and temporal attention to reduce the influence of poor signal segments. Moreover, we present an AF dataset collected from hospital wards which contains 452 subjects (mean age, 69.313.0 years; women, 46%) and 7,306 30-second segments to verify the proposed algorithm. To our best knowledge, this dataset has the most participants and covers the full age range of possible AF patients. The proposed method yields accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 95.69%, 96.76%, and 94.33%, respectively, when discriminating AF from normal sinus rhythm. More than previous studies, other arrhythmias are also taken into consideration, leading to a further investigation of AF vs. Non-AF and AF vs. Other scenarios. For the three scenarios, the proposed approach outperforms the benchmark algorithms. Additionally, the accuracy of the slight motion data improves to 95.82%, 92.39%, and 89.18% for the three scenarios, respectively, while that of full motion data increases by over 3%.

Medical fields have seen increasing attention being given to image based heart rate measurement in recent years. One of the major limitations is motion artifacts of subject’s head. Although there have been many studies focusing on signal extraction using different parameters and models, the development of frequency domain analysis is emerging slowly and moving in many directions. In the field of contact photoplethysmography (PPG), recent studies employed the acceleration signals to assist their spectral peak tracking algorithms. Inspired by the development of contact PPG, we are proposing a motion resistant spectral peak tracking (MRSPT) framework which eliminates the motion artifacts by integrating facial motion signals. The effectiveness of MRSPT coupled with the optimal image-based PPG (iPPG) signal has been tested against the state-of-the-art spectral peak tracking algorithms, multi-channel spectral matrix decomposition (MC-SMD), and the maximum peak selection coupled with optimal iPPG signal (Optimal MPS). Compared with MC-SMD and Optimal MPS, MRSPT uplifts the success rate-10 (success rate-5), the probability in which the absolute error is below ten (five) beats per mins, from 54.7% (36.3%) with MC-SMD and 73.0% (61.3%) with Optimal MPS to 90.7% (75.7%) with MRSPT in motion scenarios where subject moves arbitrarily with different distance or lighting. MRSPT also enhances the success rate-10 (success rate-5) from 40.7% (26.3%) with MC-SMD and 57.4% (45.7%) with Optimal MPS to 73.4% (58.4%) with MRSPT in all seven motion conditions including driving and running. Averagely, the success rate-five of Optimal MRSPT surpass the success rate-10 of both Optimal MPS and MC-SMD.

In this paper we investigate the latest vision-based method for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) measurement. However, constantly blood pressure supervision needs sufficient medical equipment and may require the potential patients to tie a cuff, which is extremely inconvenient for them. What's more, continuously blood pressure measuring requires the patients to stay in the hospital and professional personnel to stand by. From the research before, we have learned that photoplethysmography (PPG) can be used to measure the blood pressure, which is known as cuffless blood pressure measurement. However, for the neonate and patients with empyrosis, photoplethysmography measuring device is still less practical and restricted in use due to the necessary contact for it to measure the systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Certain level of discomfort is still unavoidable with the use of PPG. We thus focus on remote PPG (rPPG); with green red difference (GRD) and Euler video magnification (EVM) and finite impulse response (FIR) bandpass filters, we are able to recover PPG signals from remote photoplethysmography. We propose a feature extraction measuring methods which yields a root mean square error for SBP as 11.22 mmHg and 7.83 mmHg for pulse pressure (PP) combined with the ANN model. For comparison, we've also used K nearest neighbor (KNN) and deep belief network-deep neural network (DBN-DNN).

Recent years have seen increased attention being given to Blood Pressure (BP) monitoring. Among all kinds of measurements, the monitors based on Pulse Transit Time (PTT) have gain plenty of attention due to its continuous and cuffless features. Additionally, several studies proposed a fancy way to estimate photoplethysmography (PPG) signal simply via a regular webcam. Nevertheless, literatures on issues of integrating these two advanced techniques have emerged on a slowly and scattered way. Furthermore, accuracy of BP prediction model based on PTT is often limited due to the lack of data. To address the above-mentioned problems, we proposed an image based BP measurement algorithm using k-nearest neighbor and transfer learning results from MIMICII database to real task. The study also introduces newly defined PTT features which are especially suitable for image based PPG and domain adaptation. Compared with the state-of-the-art algorithm, root mean square error of SBP evaluation has been reduced from 15.08 to 14.02.

To successfully increase athletes' or exercisers' fitness and endurance, the factors of physiological signal, emotion, or the level of fatigue should be considered during the training program. Many clinical decision support systems can assist to monitor the exercisers by some wearable devices. And, the questionnaire should also be taken into account to produce a report. Such process is cumbersome, and the results are not objective. Furthermore, one may feel uncomfortable when wearing the devices during the training program. In this research, the Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) is expected to be estimated automatically without any wearable devices and questionnaires. A camera based heart rate detection algorithm and a fatigue expression feature extractor are fused to estimate the RPE value. The results show that our heart rate detection algorithm can be competitive to the wearable devices, and the trend of the detected heart rate is correlated to RPE. Moreover, the fatigue feature can help reduce the error of the estimation.

Recent years have seen increased attention being given to measure Heart Rate with remote-PPG. Previous work mainly focused on optimal signal extraction from three channels of a webcam. Several robust signal extraction methods using either optic models or frequency analysis have been discussed before. After applied these algorithms, residual noise still emerges occasionally with short time duration and relative high energy. This paper investigates the cause of residual noise and then proposed an algorithm based on continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to reduce the highly dynamic residual noise. With noise reduction and signal reconstruction, the advantages of both CWT and FFT are integrated to cope with the motion/illuminance induced residual noise. The results obtained by this system show improved SNR ratio and Entropy under both motion and stationary conditions.

With the surging significance of personal health care, driver’s physiological state is no longer negligible nowadays. Among all the indicators of health state in human, heart rate (HR) is one of the most cardinal indicators. The commonly used HR measurement is contact-type, might result in driver’s distraction and discomfort in the vehicle applications. To cope with this problem, remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is utilized to monitor HR at a distance via a web camera. Nevertheless, the rPPG is not without its flaw. The main concern of the rPPG technique is the potential not-robustness result from the arbitrary motion. Consequently, the contribution of this paper is to conquer the motion noise when the car is driving and the driver’s health state is well monitored to enhance the public safety. The proposed algorithm is investigated in not only the indoor environment but as well the outdoor driving, which contains much more unpredictable motion. With k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classifier on chrominance-based features, the mean square error can be reduced from 30.6 to 2.79 bpm, approaching the medical instrument level. The proposed method can be applied to human improving driving safety for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.

In the last decade, many advances have been made in the field of automatic temperature estimation, including wearable sensor technologies (WST), infrared thermography (IRT), and non-contact infrared thermometer (NCIT). In contrast with the WST and IRT, NCIT is inexpensive without the risk of potential skin irritation. Nevertheless, NCIT is limited in short valid estimation distance (

Image enhancement techniques primarily improve the contrast of an image to lend it a better appearance. One of the popular enhancement methods is histogram equalization (HE) because of its simplicity and effectiveness. However, it is rarely applied to consumer electronics products because it can cause excessive contrast enhancement and feature loss problems. These problems make the images processed by HE look unnatural and introduce unwanted artifacts in them. In this study, a visual contrast enhancement algorithm (VCEA) based on HE is proposed. VCEA considers the requirements of the human visual perception in order to address the drawbacks of HE. It effectively solves the excessive contrast enhancement problem by adjusting the spaces between two adjacent gray values of the HE histogram. In addition, VCEA reduces the effects of the feature loss problem by using the obtained spaces. Furthermore, VCEA enhances the detailed textures of an image to generate an enhanced image with better visual quality. Experimental results show that images obtained by applying VCEA have higher contrast and are more suited to human visual perception than those processed by HE and other HE-based methods.

The intelligent transportation systems (ITS) aim to provide services to transport and traffic management and supply more information and safer to various users. The visual-based systems are the most popular solutions for ITS due to their highly maintainable, flexible, and intuitive features. This paper uses a background extraction algorithm to extract initial color backgrounds from surveillance video based on an entropy-analysis concept. The moving objects can then be segmented quickly and correctly by a robust object segmentation algorithm. The segmented object can be used to analyze the trajectory and to provide the collision between pedestrian and moving vehicle. A license plate detection algorithm is also provided to detect the license plate in this study.