METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR CONTACT-FREE HEART RATE MEASUREMENT

• US 20130096439A1
• Filed: 07/31/2012
• Published: 04/18/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 10/14/2011
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Industrial Technology Research Institute
• Original Assignee: Industrial Technology Research Institute
• Inventors: Lee, Kual-Zheng, Hung, Pang-Chan, Tsai, Luo-Wei
• Application Number:
  US13/563,394
• Publication Number:
  US 20130096439A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 600/479
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 5/024 Detecting, measuring or recording pulse rate or heart rate A61B5/0205, A61B5/021 take precedence
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 5/1032 Determining colour for diagnostic purposes measuring colour in general G01J3/46
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 5/7257 using Fourier transforms

Abstract

A method and a system for heart rate measurement are provided. The method includes: capturing at least one image, detecting skin-like points by using a skin color detector, labeling the skin-like points and tracking at least one target to be measured, taking statistics on color values of the target at multiple time points, measuring the heart rate through frequency transformation. The method and the system are easy to setup fully an automatic contact-free measurement of multiple persons'"'"' heart rates at a time, and applicable in multiple regions of human body for heart rate measurement such as head and neck, arm, and palm regions.

Claims

1. A method for contact-free heart rate measurement, comprising:

capturing a pattern information;

judging at least one pixel being a skin-like point in the pattern information to output a flag value, and to obtain a color value corresponding to the pixel in the pattern information;

determining the region of at least one target to be measured from the skin-like points to obtain a pixel information of the at least one target;

calculating statistics on targets in a single picture in the pattern information to obtain at least one color value of at least one target region;

obtaining a motion track of at least one target according to a space relation or appearance similarity between the at least one target region at multiple time points;

taking statistics on the pixel information at multiple time points, to transform the pixel information into frequency domain to obtain signal distribution bands and magnitude thereof; and

calculating a heart rate represented by a band according to a time interval between adjacent pictures in the pattern information.

2. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 1, wherein the pattern information has videos or images of at least one human skin region of at least one person, the pattern information is obtained from at least one image captured from a picture, at least one opened video file, at least one connected video stream, at least one image shot by a camera, or at least one image shot by a handheld device or tablet PC;

and the pattern information are stored in at least one readable device in a time sequence.

3. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 2, wherein the readable device is a memory;

and the format of the pattern information is red, green and blue (RGB), luminance, chrominance and chroma (YUV), or hue, saturation and value (HSV).

4. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 1, wherein the skin-like points are detected according to a skin probability lookup table trained by neural networks.

5. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 1, wherein adjacent skin-like points are labeled with the same label to form a region according to the flag value and a connected component labeling method, a region with an excessively large or small area is filtered according to a preset threshold, and a region that meets the preset threshold is regarded as a target.

6. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 1, wherein at least one region of interest is defined, the skin-like points that are located in the region of interest range is a target.

7. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 1, wherein the color values of skin-like points are calculated according to the following equation:

8. The method for contact-free heart measurement according to claim 1, wherein the region of targets in each picture of the pattern information is recorded, targets in adjacent pictures and having nearby coordinates or similar appearances are regarded as a single object, and a track of the object is recorded.

9. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 8, wherein at a time point t, the target region of the picture in the pattern information is R_tⁱ, the number M_t of trackable targets in the picture and target information O_t^j of the j^th tracked target is obtained where j=1,2, . . . M_t, in which O_t^j comprises a set of color values {v_t^j} in each time point and v_t^j=u_tⁱ if the target region R_tⁱ belongs to O_t^j.

10. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 1, wherein the taking statistics with a transformation method is discrete Fourier transformation (DFT), fast Fourier transformation (FFT), discrete cosine transformation (DCT), Hadamard transformation (HT), or discrete wavelet transformation (DWT).

11. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 10, wherein the DFT equation is:

12. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 10, wherein further comprises:

Obtaining a smallest and a largest data counts from a fame rate of a video capture device in a preset time period for heart rate measurement, and selecting several data counts as preset parameters in ascending order in a time period, wherein a set W={w₁, w₂, . . . , w_m} is set to be a pre-selected data count set, wherein the values are arranged in ascending order and a total number of elements is |M|, and an initial value m=1, so that a data count T=w_m;

inputting a video data I_t;

filtering expandable data count range, judging whether I_t meets condition that t≧

w₁, m<

|W|, and if yes, performing a next step;

judging whether to adjust the data count, judging whether I_t after the foregoing step meets the condition that t≧

w_m+1, and if yes, performing a next step; and

expanding the data count to increase the data count as T=w_m+1.

13. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 1, wherein a frame rate of the pattern information is K fps, T is a data count to be transformed, and an equation for transformation between the band b and the heart rate H(b) bpm is as follows:

14. The method for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 13, wherein a minimum and a maximum values of a rational heart rate being 40 and 240 are set, for the target, a heart rate of the target is calculated through transformation by using a band b_t^j having the largest magnitude in the rational heart rate range in combination with an equation, wherein X^j(b) is a magnitude value;

and the band b_t^j is calculated according to the following equation;

15. A system for contact-free heart rate measurement, comprising:

a video capture module, configured to capture a pattern information comprising videos or images of at least one human skin region of at least one person; and

a heart rate computing module, configured to calculate at least one heart rate according to the pattern information.

16. The system for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 15, further comprising:

a data carrier, configured to store a heart rate or parameters required for computation; and

a display device to display the heart rate.

17. The system for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 15, wherein the format of the pattern information is red, green and blue (RGB), luminance, chrominance and chroma (YUV), or hue, saturation and value (HSV).

18. The system for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 15, wherein the video capture module is a camera, a handheld device or a tablet PC having a camera, a program capable of capturing a screen picture, a video file, or a network video stream.

19. The system for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 18, wherein the camera has a reference template, the camera is a network camera, or the handheld device comprises a reference template.

20. The system for contact-free heart rate measurement according to claim 15, wherein the heart rate computing module comprises:

a skin color detector, to judge a pixel that is similar to a human skin color in the pattern information and to output a flag value of a skin-like point;

a target label maker, to obtain the region of at least one target according to the flag value of the skin-like point and to obtain a pixel information of the at least one target;

a color calculator, to obtain at least one color value of at least one target region according to the at least one target;

a target tracker, to track the at least one target to obtain a space relation between the at least one target region at multiple time points, and to obtain a motion track of the at least one target;

a frequency transformation filter, to take statistics on data at the multiple time points and transforming the data into frequency domain to obtain signal distribution bands and magnitude thereof; and

a heart rate measurer, to calculate a heart rate that is represented by each band according to a known time interval of adjacent pictures in the pattern information.