Abstract
Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG), which measures human heart rate without physical contact with the skin, has become active research in recent years. Neural networks have been introduced into rPPG for accurate pulse measurement and have achieved overwhelming results. However, there is a lack of in-depth analysis of key components of neural networks exhibiting a crucial impact on pulse extraction from video. In this paper, we present a network with attention and spatio-temporal convolutional block (ASTNet), exploiting the impact of key factors including different spatio-temporal convolutions, attention mechanism, the number of convolutional layers, and receptive field sizes. The novel attention module named spatio-temporal-channel (STC) attention is designed to jointly learn weights in spatial, temporal, and channel dimensions in a more efficient way. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two uncompressed datasets and one compressed dataset. Results show that ASTNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and computational time. Specifically, networks with larger receptive field sizes and more spatio-temporal blocks generally achieve better performance. Networks with pseudo 3D convolution outperform those with convolutional 3D in static videos, and the opposite is true in motion videos. The results exhibit a similar tendency both on uncompressed and compressed datasets. The proposed method improves the performance of pulse signal compared to PhysNet (the second-best approach in the compared methods), with the signal-to-noise ratio increased by 7.03%, 10.19%, 4.79%, the mean absolute error decreased by 17.95%, 14.17%, 22.76%, and the root-mean-square error decreased by 21.43%, 2.73%, 25.43%, on the PURE, Self-rPPG, and COHFACE datasets, respectively.
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Funding
This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.s 61903336, 61976190, 62073294, 62002327; Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province under Grant No. 2020C03070. Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province under Grant No.s LY21F030015, LZ21F030003.
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All authors contributed to the research idea and model design. Material preparation and analysis were performed by CZ, YL, and YF. The experiments were finished by FJ and ZC. The manuscript was written by MH. The idea of STC was proposed by MH and CZ. The experiments of the revised manuscript were conducted by MH. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhao, C., Hu, M., Ju, F. et al. Convolutional neural network with spatio-temporal-channel attention for remote heart rate estimation. Vis Comput 39, 4767–4785 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-022-02624-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-022-02624-w