Non-contact Heart Rate and Respiratory Rate Estimation from Videos of the Neck

Heart Rate (HR) and Respiratory Rate (RR) estimation constitutes a crucial part of non-contact assessment of cardiovascular disease, which has been a leading cause of death worldwide. This paper proposes a novel HR and RR estimation algorithm based on RGB videos recorded by a smartphone camera. Instead of requiring facial videos, this novel algorithm demonstrates the ability to estimate HR and RR using only a video of the human neck. This novel algorithm captures cardiac as well as respiratory activity via detecting skin displacement by only analyzing the Laplacian pyramid of each frame of the video. Its performance was evaluated by applying it to the videos of neck of 80 participants and comparing it to existing methods, demonstrating the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.