Non-contact and remote measurements of vital physical signals are important for reliable and comfortable physiological self-assessment. In this paper, we provide a new video-based methodology for remote and fast measurements of vital physical signals such as cardiac pulse and breathing rate. A webcam is used to track color video of a human face or wrist, and a Photoplethysmography (PPG) technique is applied to perform the measurements of the vital signals. A novel sequential blind signal extraction methodology is applied to the color video under normal lighting conditions, based on correlation analysis between the green trace and the source signals. The approach is successfully applied in the measurement of vital signals under the condition of different illuminating in which the target signal can also be found out accurately. To assess the advantages, the measuring time of a large number of cases is recorded correctly. The experimental results show that it only takes less than 30 seconds to measure the vital physical signals using presented technique. The study indicates the proposed approach is feasible for PPG technique, which provides a way to study the relationship of the signal for different ROI in future research.

Date Published: 11 October 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8915, Photonics North 2013, 891502 (11 October 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2033273

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8915:
Photonics North 2013
Pavel Cheben; Jens Schmid; Caroline Boudoux; Lawrence R. Chen; André Delâge; Siegfried Janz; Raman Kashyap; David J. Lockwood; Hans-Peter Loock; Zetian Mi, Editor(s)