# Toward Motion Robustness: A masked attention regularization framework in remote photoplethysmography

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06653 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06653/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Remote Photoplethysmograph Signal Measurement from Facial Videos Using Spatio-Temporal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02419/) (2019)
- [PhysFormer: Facial Video-based Physiological Measurement with Temporal Difference Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12082/) (2021)
- [RhythmNet: End-to-end Heart Rate Estimation from Face via Spatial-temporal Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11515/) (2019)
- [Remote Heart Rate Measurement from Highly Compressed Facial Videos: an End-to-end Deep Learning Solution with Video Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11921/) (2019)
- [Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Cross-verified Feature Disentangling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08213/) (2020)
- [EfficientPhys: Enabling Simple, Fast and Accurate Camera-Based Vitals Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04447/) (2021)
- [The Way to my Heart is through Contrastive Learning: Remote Photoplethysmography from Unlabelled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09748/) (2021)
- [PulseGAN: Learning to generate realistic pulse waveforms in remote photoplethysmography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02699/) (2020)
- [Meta-rPPG: Remote Heart Rate Estimation Using a Transductive Meta-Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06786/) (2020)
- [MMPD: Multi-Domain Mobile Video Physiology Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03840/) (2023)
- [Camera Measurement of Physiological Vital Signs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11547/) (2021)
- [AutoHR: A Strong End-to-end Baseline for Remote Heart Rate Measurement with Neural Searching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12292/) (2020)
- [Learning Motion-Robust Remote Photoplethysmography through Arbitrary Resolution Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16922/) (2022)
- [Facial Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15401/) (2022)
- [Motion Matters: Neural Motion Transfer for Better Camera Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12059/) (2023)
- [EVM-CNN: Real-Time Contactless Heart Rate Estimation from Facial Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13843/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [BeatFormer: Efficient motion-robust remote heart rate estimation through unsupervised spectral zoomed attention filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14885/) (2025)
- [PhysFlow: Frequency Decoupled with Dual-Field Rectified Flow for Remote Photoplethysmography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23226/) (2026)
- [Facial Spatiotemporal Graphs: Leveraging the 3D Facial Surface for Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13724/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There has been growing interest in facial video-based remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) measurement recently, with a focus on assessing various vital signs such as heart rate and heart rate variability. Despite previous efforts on static datasets, their approaches have been hindered by inaccurate region of interest (ROI) localization and motion issues, and have shown limited generalization in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel masked attention regularization (MAR-rPPG) framework that mitigates the impact of ROI localization and complex motion artifacts. Specifically, our approach first integrates a masked attention regularization mechanism into the rPPG field to capture the visual semantic consistency of facial clips, while it also employs a masking technique to prevent the model from overfitting on inaccurate ROIs and subsequently degrading its performance. Furthermore, we propose an enhanced rPPG expert aggregation (EREA) network as the backbone to obtain rPPG signals and attention maps simultaneously. Our EREA network is capable of discriminating divergent attentions from different facial areas and retaining the consistency of spatiotemporal attention maps. For motion robustness, a simple open source detector MediaPipe for data preprocessing is sufficient for our framework due to its superior capability of rPPG signal extraction and attention regularization. Exhaustive experiments on three benchmark datasets (UBFC-rPPG, PURE, and MMPD) substantiate the superiority of our proposed method, outperforming recent state-of-the-art works by a considerable margin.
