Research progressing during the last decade focuses more on non-contact based systems to monitor Heart Rate (HR) which are simple, low-cost and comfortable to use. Most of the non-contact based systems are using RGB videos which is suitable for lab environment. However, it needs to progress considerably before they can be applied in real life applications. As luminance (light) has significance contribution on RGB videos HR monitoring using RGB videos are not efficient enough in real life applications in outdoor environment. This paper presents a HR monitoring method using Lab color facial video captured by a webcam of a laptop computer. Lab color space is device independent and HR can be extracted through facial skin color variation caused by blood circulation considering variable environmental light. Here, three different signal processing methods i.e., Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) have been applied on the color channels in video recordings and blood volume pulse (BVP) has been extracted from the facial regions. In this study, HR is subsequently quantified and compare with a reference measurement. The result shows that high degrees of accuracy have been achieved compared to the reference measurements. Thus, this technology has significant potential for advancing personal health care, telemedicine and many real life applications such as driver monitoring.
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