Blood Volume Pulse Extraction for Non-Contact Heart Rate Measurement by Digital Camera Using Singular Value Decomposition and Burg Algorithm

Conventional photoplesthymograph (PPG) measurements for heart rate (HR) determination require direct contact between the patient and the PPG device sensor. When using the conventional method, it is possible for users to suffer undesirable skin irritation, discomfort and soreness. Thus, the development of non-contact PPG has been investigated with various technologies and methods. One of the technologies that able to measure PPG in a non-contact way and at low cost is using digital cameras such as webcams. Various filters have been implemented to do non-contact PPG using digital cameras. This paper proposes a non-contact PPG filter system utilizing singular value decomposition (SVD) and Burg’s algorithm. The main role of SVD is for noise removal and as PPG signal extractor. As for the Burg algorithm, it was utilized for estimating the heart rate value from the filtered PPG signal. In this paper, we show and analyze an experiment for HR measurement using our method and a previous method that used independent component analysis (ICA). We compare and contrast both of them with HR measurements acquired by a commercial oximeter. The experiments were conducted at various distance between 30~110 cm and light intensities between 5~2000 lux. The estimated HR showed 2.25 bpm of mean error and 0.73 of Pearson correlation coefficient. The optimal distance between the mirror and user for HR measurement was 50 cm with medium light intensity, around 550 lux.