Contrast-Phys: Unsupervised Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Spatiotemporal Contrast

Video-based remote physiological measurement utilizes face videos to measure the blood volume change signal, which is also called remote photoplethysmography (rPPG). Supervised methods for rPPG measurements achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, supervised rPPG methods require face videos and ground truth physiological signals for model training. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised rPPG measurement method that does not require ground truth signals for training. We use a 3DCNN model to generate multiple rPPG signals from each video in different spatiotemporal locations and train the model with a contrastive loss where rPPG signals from the same video are pulled together while those from different videos are pushed away. We test on five public datasets, including RGB videos and NIR videos. The results show that our method outperforms the previous unsupervised baseline and achieves accuracies very close to the current best supervised rPPG methods on all five datasets. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that our approach can run at a much faster speed and is more robust to noises than the previous unsupervised baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhaodongsun/contrast-phys.