Heart Rate Based Face Synthesis for Pulse Estimation

With the technological advancements in non-invasive heart rate (HR) detection, it becomes more feasible to estimate heart rate using commodity digital cameras. However, achieving high accuracy in HR estimation still remains a challenge. One of the bottlenecks is the lack of sufficient facial videos annotated with corresponding HR signals. In order to prevent this bottleneck, we propose to create videos enriched with different HR values from existing data sets with an attempt to increase the data size in a controllable manner. This paper presents a new method to generate facial videos with various heart rate values through a video synthesis procedure. Our method involves the synthesis of heart beat effects from skin colors of a face. New face video is generated with various heart rate values while taking identity information into account. The quality of the synthetic videos is evaluated by comparing to the original ground truth videos at the pixel level as well as by computing their differentiability across the synthetic face videos. Furthermore, the usability of the new data is assessed through the application of HR estimation from remote video approaches.