Performance Evaluation of rPPG Approaches with and without the Region-of-Interest Localization Step

Traditionally, the first step in physiological measurements based on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is localizing the region of interest (ROI) that contains a desired pulsatile information. Recently, approaches that do not require this step have been proposed. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of selected approaches with and without ROI localization step in rPPG signal extraction. The Viola-Jones face detector and Kanade–Lucas–Tomasi tracker (VK) in combination with (a) a region-of-interest (ROI) cropping, (b) facial landmarks, (c) skin-color segmentation, and (d) skin detection based on maximization of mutual information and an approach without ROI localization step (Full Video Pulse (FVP)) were studied. Final rPPG signals were extracted using selected model-based and data-driven rPPG algorithms. The performance of the approaches was tested on three publicly available data sets offering compressed and uncompressed video recordings covering various scenarios. The success rates of pulse waveform signal extraction range from 88.37% (VK with skin-color segmentation) to 100% (FVP). In challenging scenarios (skin tone, lighting conditions, exercise), there were no statistically significant differences between the studied approaches in terms of SNR. The best overall performance in terms of RMSE was achieved by a combination of VK with ROI cropping and the model-based rPPG algorithm. Results indicate that the selection of the ROI localization approach does not significantly affect rPPG measurements if combined with a robust algorithm for rPPG signal extraction.