# RhythmNet: End-to-end Heart Rate Estimation from Face via Spatial-temporal Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.11515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11515/

## Key facts

- Cited by 105 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 105)

- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [PhysFormer: Facial Video-based Physiological Measurement with Temporal Difference Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12082/) (2021)
- [rPPG-Toolbox: Deep Remote PPG Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00716/) (2022)
- [Contrast-Phys: Unsupervised Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Spatiotemporal Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04378/) (2022)
- [PhysFormer++: Facial Video-based Physiological Measurement with SlowFast Temporal Difference Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03548/) (2023)
- [TransRPPG: Remote Photoplethysmography Transformer for 3D Mask Face Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07419/) (2021)
- [Non-Contrastive Unsupervised Learning of Physiological Signals from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07944/) (2023)
- [rPPG-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training with Masked Autoencoders for Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02301/) (2023)
- [Contrast-Phys+: Unsupervised and Weakly-supervised Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Spatiotemporal Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06924/) (2023)
- [Neuron Structure Modeling for Generalizable Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05955/) (2023)
- [RhythmFormer: Extracting Patterned rPPG Signals based on Periodic Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12788/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised Representation Learning Framework for Remote Physiological Measurement Using Spatiotemporal Augmentation Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07695/) (2021)
- [Facial Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15401/) (2022)
- [Face2PPG: An unsupervised pipeline for blood volume pulse extraction from faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04101/) (2022)
- [GPT as Psychologist? Preliminary Evaluations for GPT-4V on Visual Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05916/) (2024)
- [RhythmMamba: Fast, Lightweight, and Accurate Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06483/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Relighting Against Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07920/) (2021)
- [Dual-path TokenLearner for Remote Photoplethysmography-based Physiological Measurement with Facial Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07771/) (2023)
- [FactorizePhys: Matrix Factorization for Multidimensional Attention in Remote Physiological Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01542/) (2024)
- [Advancing Generalizable Remote Physiological Measurement through the Integration of Explicit and Implicit Prior Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06947/) (2024)
- [Efficient Remote Photoplethysmography with Temporal Derivative Modules and Time-Shift Invariant Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10882/) (2022)
- [PhysMLE: Generalizable and Priors-Inclusive Multi-task Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06201/) (2024)
- [Camera-Based HRV Prediction for Remote Learning Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04161/) (2023)
- [Efficient Mixture-of-Expert for Video-based Driver State and Physiological Multi-task Estimation in Conditional Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21086/) (2024)
- [TransPPG: Two-stream Transformer for Remote Heart Rate Estimate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10873/) (2022)
- [PhysDrive: A Multimodal Remote Physiological Measurement Dataset for In-vehicle Driver Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19172/) (2025)
- [Overcoming Difficulty in Obtaining Dark-skinned Subjects for Remote-PPG by Synthetic Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06007/) (2021)
- [Assessment of Deep Learning-based Heart Rate Estimation using Remote Photoplethysmography under Different Illuminations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13193/) (2021)
- [Orientation-conditioned Facial Texture Mapping for Video-based Facial Remote Photoplethysmography Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09378/) (2024)
- [Fully Test-Time rPPG Estimation via Synthetic Signal-Guided Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13322/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Heart rate (HR) is an important physiological signal that reflects the physical and emotional status of a person. Traditional HR measurements usually rely on contact monitors, which may cause inconvenience and discomfort. Recently, some methods have been proposed for remote HR estimation from face videos; however, most of them focus on well-controlled scenarios, their generalization ability into less-constrained scenarios (e.g., with head movement, and bad illumination) are not known. At the same time, lacking large-scale HR databases has limited the use of deep models for remote HR estimation. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end RhythmNet for remote HR estimation from the face. In RyhthmNet, we use a spatial-temporal representation encoding the HR signals from multiple ROI volumes as its input. Then the spatial-temporal representations are fed into a convolutional network for HR estimation. We also take into account the relationship of adjacent HR measurements from a video sequence via Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and achieves efficient HR measurement. In addition, we build a large-scale multi-modal HR database (named as VIPL-HR, available at 'http://vipl.ict.ac.cn/view_database.php?id=15'), which contains 2,378 visible light videos (VIS) and 752 near-infrared (NIR) videos of 107 subjects. Our VIPL-HR database contains various variations such as head movements, illumination variations, and acquisition device changes, replicating a less-constrained scenario for HR estimation. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both the public-domain and our VIPL-HR databases.