Efficient Spatiotemporal Attention Network for Remote Heart Rate Variability Analysis

Studies have shown that ordinary color cameras can detect the subtle color changes of the skin caused by the heartbeat cycle. Therefore, cameras can be used to remotely monitor the pulse in a non-contact manner. The technology for non-contact physiological measurement in this way is called remote photoplethysmography (rPPG). Heart rate variability (HRV) analysis, as a very important physiological feature, requires us to be able to accurately recover the peak time locations of the rPPG signal. This paper proposes an efficient spatiotemporal attention network (ESA-rPPGNet) to recover high-quality rPPG signal for heart rate variability analysis. First, 3D depth-wise separable convolution and a structure based on mobilenet v3 are used to greatly reduce the time complexity of the network. Next, a lightweight attention block called 3D shuffle attention (3D-SA), which integrates spatial attention and channel attention, is designed to enable the network to effectively capture inter-channel dependencies and pixel-level dependencies. Moreover, ConvGRU is introduced to further improve the network’s ability to learn long-term spatiotemporal feature information. Compared with existing methods, the experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper has better performance and robustness on the remote HRV analysis.