# PHASE-Net: Physics-Grounded Harmonic Attention System for Efficient Remote Photoplethysmography Measurement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24850/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [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)
- [EfficientPhys: Enabling Simple, Fast and Accurate Camera-Based Vitals Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04447/) (2021)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Causal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05209/) (2023)
- [Contrast-Phys+: Unsupervised and Weakly-supervised Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Spatiotemporal Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06924/) (2023)
- [RhythmFormer: Extracting Patterned rPPG Signals based on Periodic Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12788/) (2024)
- [Image Enhancement for Remote Photoplethysmography in a Low-Light Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09336/) (2023)
- [UniEmo: Unifying Emotional Understanding and Generation with Learnable Expert Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23372/) (2025)
- [PhysMamba: Efficient Remote Physiological Measurement with SlowFast Temporal Difference Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12031/) (2024)
- [PhysLLM: Harnessing Large Language Models for Cross-Modal Remote Physiological Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03621/) (2025)
- [CardiacMamba: A Multimodal RGB-RF Fusion Framework with State Space Models for Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13624/) (2025)
- [AU-LLM: Micro-Expression Action Unit Detection via Enhanced LLM-Based Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21778/) (2025)
- [Remote Photoplethysmography in Real-World and Extreme Lighting Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11465/) (2025)
- [Adaptively Enhancing Facial Expression Crucial Regions via Local Non-Local Joint Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14045/) (2022)
- [Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21855/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [AffectAgent: Collaborative Multi-Agent Reasoning for Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12735/) (2026)
- [FreqPhys: Repurposing Implicit Physiological Frequency Prior for Robust Remote Photoplethysmography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00534/) (2026)
- [Intervention-Based Self-Supervised Learning: A Causal Probe Paradigm for Remote Photoplethysmography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00882/) (2026)
- [PhysFlow: Frequency Decoupled with Dual-Field Rectified Flow for Remote Photoplethysmography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23226/) (2026)
- [Signed-Graph Recommendation as Structural Consistency Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05952/) (2026)
- [PhysAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable Remote Heart Rate Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00066/) (2026)
- [SVC 2026: the Second Multimodal Deception Detection Challenge and the First Domain Generalized Remote Physiological Measurement Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05748/) (2026)
- [PCA: Persistence-Aware Compression and Aggregation for Fast Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22726/) (2026)
- [CardiacMamba: Fair and Robust RGB-RF Fusion for Remote Heart Rate Estimation via State Space Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15831/) (2026)
- [PhysVR: Vision-Language Model Guided Interference-aware Temporal Feature Refinement for Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29663/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) measurement enables non-contact physiological monitoring but suffers from accuracy degradation under head motion and illumination changes. Existing deep learning methods are mostly heuristic and lack theoretical grounding, limiting robustness and interpretability. In this work, we propose a physics-informed rPPG paradigm derived from the Navier-Stokes equations of hemodynamics, showing that the pulse signal follows a second-order dynamical system whose discrete solution naturally leads to a causal convolution, justifying the use of a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Based on this principle, we design the PHASE-Net, a lightweight model with three key components: 1) Zero-FLOPs Axial Swapper module to swap or transpose a few spatial channels to mix distant facial regions, boosting cross-region feature interaction without changing temporal order; 2) Adaptive Spatial Filter to learn a soft spatial mask per frame to highlight signal-rich areas and suppress noise for cleaner feature maps; and 3) Gated TCN, a causal dilated TCN with gating that models long-range temporal dynamics for accurate pulse recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PHASE-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong efficiency, offering a theoretically grounded and deployment-ready rPPG solution. The source code is available at https://github.com/Alex036225/PhaseNet.