Remote photo-plethysmography (rPPG) has emerged as a non-intrusive and promising physiological sensing capability in human–computer interface (HCI) research, gradually extending its applications in health-monitoring and clinical care contexts. With advanced machine learning models, recent datasets collected in real-world conditions have gradually enhanced the performance of rPPG methods in recovering heart-rate and heart-rate-variability metrics. However, the signal quality of reference ground-truth PPG data in existing datasets is by and large neglected, while poor-quality references negatively influence models. Here, this work introduces a new imaging blood volume pulse (iBVP) dataset of synchronized RGB and thermal infrared videos with ground-truth PPG signals from ear with their high-resolution-signal-quality labels, for the first time. Participants perform rhythmic breathing, head-movement, and stress-inducing tasks, which help reflect real-world variations in psycho-physiological states. This work conducts dense (per sample) signal-quality assessment to discard noisy segments of ground-truth and corresponding video frames. We further present a novel end-to-end machine learning framework, iBVPNet, that features an efficient and effective spatio-temporal feature aggregation for the reliable estimation of BVP signals. Finally, this work examines the feasibility of extracting BVP signals from thermal video frames, which is under-explored. The iBVP dataset and source codes are publicly available for research use.
Link to Github: https://github.com/PhysiologicAILab/iBVP-Dataset
Link to our paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/13/7/1334
