# egoPPG: Heart Rate Estimation from Eye-Tracking Cameras in Egocentric Systems to Benefit Downstream Vision Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20879 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20879/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 112 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [Understanding Human Hands in Contact at Internet Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06669/) (2020)
- [Project Aria: A New Tool for Egocentric Multi-Modal AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13561/) (2023)
- [Learning Video Representations from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04501/) (2022)
- [Anticipative Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02036/) (2021)
- [MeMViT: Memory-Augmented Multiscale Vision Transformer for Efficient Long-Term Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08383/) (2022)
- [NeRF-SLAM: Real-Time Dense Monocular SLAM with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13641/) (2022)
- [HoloAssist: an Egocentric Human Interaction Dataset for Interactive AI Assistants in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17024/) (2023)
- [DeepPhys: Video-Based Physiological Measurement Using Convolutional Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07888/) (2018)
- [Multiview Transformers for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04288/) (2022)
- [MoViNets: Mobile Video Networks for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11511/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09905/) (2024)
- [AvatarPoser: Articulated Full-Body Pose Tracking from Sparse Motion Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13784/) (2022)
- [Learning Multi-Scene Absolute Pose Regression with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11468/) (2021)
- [Predicting Gaze in Egocentric Video by Learning Task-dependent Attention Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09125/) (2018)
- [Mo2Cap2: Real-time Mobile 3D Motion Capture with a Cap-mounted Fisheye Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05959/) (2018)
- [rPPG-Toolbox: Deep Remote PPG Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00716/) (2022)
- [VIPL-HR: A Multi-modal Database for Pulse Estimation from Less-constrained Face Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04927/) (2018)
- [MMPD: Multi-Domain Mobile Video Physiology Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03840/) (2023)
- [A Reproducible Study on Remote Heart Rate Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00962/) (2017)
- [In the Eye of Transformer: Global-Local Correlation for Egocentric Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04464/) (2022)
- [Going Deeper into First-Person Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03688/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [SkillFormer: Unified Multi-View Video Understanding for Proficiency Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08665/) (2025)
- [PATS: Proficiency-Aware Temporal Sampling for Multi-View Sports Skill Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04996/) (2025)
- [egoEMOTION: Egocentric Vision and Physiological Signals for Emotion and Personality Recognition in Real-World Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22129/) (2025)
- [ProfVLM: A lightweight video-language model for multi-view proficiency estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26278/) (2025)
- [SkillSight: Efficient First-Person Skill Assessment with Gaze](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19629/) (2025)
- [NymeriaPlus: Enriching Nymeria Dataset with Additional Annotations and Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18496/) (2026)
- [Parameter-Efficient Multi-View Proficiency Estimation: From Discriminative Classification to Generative Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03848/) (2026)
- [GazePrior: Zero-Shot AR/VR Eye Tracking via Learned 3D Gaze Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22359/) (2026)
- [SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17615/) (2026)
- [SkillSpotter: Pose-Aware Multi-View Skilled Action Detection and Grading in Ego-Exo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31127/) (2026)
- [EgoHRV: Continuous Heart Rate Variability Estimation from Egocentric Systems for Autonomic Response and Skill Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18711/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Egocentric vision systems aim to understand the spatial surroundings and the wearer's behavior inside it, including motions, activities, and interactions. We argue that egocentric systems must additionally detect physiological states to capture a person's attention and situational responses, which are critical for context-aware behavior modeling. In this paper, we propose egoPPG, a novel vision task for egocentric systems to recover a person's cardiac activity to aid downstream vision tasks. We introduce PulseFormer, a method to extract heart rate as a key indicator of physiological state from the eye tracking cameras on unmodified egocentric vision systems. PulseFormer continuously estimates the photoplethysmogram (PPG) from areas around the eyes and fuses motion cues from the headset's inertial measurement unit to track HR values. We demonstrate egoPPG's downstream benefit for a key task on EgoExo4D, an existing egocentric dataset for which we find PulseFormer's estimates of HR to improve proficiency estimation by 14%. To train and validate PulseFormer, we collected a dataset of 13+ hours of eye tracking videos from Project Aria and contact-based PPG signals as well as an electrocardiogram (ECG) for ground-truth HR values. Similar to EgoExo4D, 25 participants performed diverse everyday activities such as office work, cooking, dancing, and exercising, which induced significant natural motion and HR variation (44-164 bpm). Our model robustly estimates HR (MAE=7.67 bpm) and captures patterns (r=0.85). Our results show how egocentric systems may unify environmental and physiological tracking to better understand users and that egoPPG as a complementary task provides meaningful augmentations for existing datasets and tasks. We release our code, dataset, and HR augmentations for EgoExo4D to inspire research on physiology-aware egocentric tasks.