# Instantaneous Physiological Estimation using Video Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.12368 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12368/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Video Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00719/) (2021)
- [DeepPhys: Video-Based Physiological Measurement Using Convolutional Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07888/) (2018)
- [Multi-Task Temporal Shift Attention Networks for On-Device Contactless Vitals Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03790/) (2020)
- [Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Cross-verified Feature Disentangling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08213/) (2020)
- [The Way to my Heart is through Contrastive Learning: Remote Photoplethysmography from Unlabelled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09748/) (2021)
- [Towards Inheritable Models for Open-Set Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04388/) (2020)
- [TransRPPG: Remote Photoplethysmography Transformer for 3D Mask Face Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07419/) (2021)
- [The First Vision For Vitals (V4V) Challenge for Non-Contact Video-Based Physiological Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10471/) (2021)
- [iPhys: An Open Non-Contact Imaging-Based Physiological Measurement Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04366/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [PhysFormer++: Facial Video-based Physiological Measurement with SlowFast Temporal Difference Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03548/) (2023)
- [rPPG-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training with Masked Autoencoders for Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02301/) (2023)
- [Remote Heart Rate Monitoring in Smart Environments from Videos with Self-supervised Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15388/) (2023)
- [Contactless Cardiac Pulse Monitoring Using Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09529/) (2025)
- [Non-Contact Physiological Monitoring in Pediatric Intensive Care Units via Adaptive Masking and Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15967/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video-based physiological signal estimation has been limited primarily to predicting episodic scores in windowed intervals. While these intermittent values are useful, they provide an incomplete picture of patients' physiological status and may lead to late detection of critical conditions. We propose a video Transformer for estimating instantaneous heart rate and respiration rate from face videos. Physiological signals are typically confounded by alignment errors in space and time. To overcome this, we formulated the loss in the frequency domain. We evaluated the method on the large scale Vision-for-Vitals (V4V) benchmark. It outperformed both shallow and deep learning based methods for instantaneous respiration rate estimation. In the case of heart-rate estimation, it achieved an instantaneous-MAE of 13.0 beats-per-minute.