# VideoPulse: Neonatal heart rate and peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (SpO2) estimation from contact free video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23771 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23771/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Delving into Deep Imbalanced Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09554/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [AutoHR: A Strong End-to-end Baseline for Remote Heart Rate Measurement with Neural Searching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12292/) (2020)
- [Non-Contrastive Unsupervised Learning of Physiological Signals from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07944/) (2023)
- [RhythmMamba: Fast, Lightweight, and Accurate Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06483/) (2024)
- [EVM-CNN: Real-Time Contactless Heart Rate Estimation from Facial Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13843/) (2022)
- [Neonatal Face and Facial Landmark Detection from Video Recordings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04341/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contact free monitoring of vital signs and is especially valuable for neonates, since conventional methods often require sustained skin contact with adhesive probes that can irritate fragile skin and increase infection control burden. We present VideoPulse, a neonatal dataset and an end to end pipeline that estimates neonatal heart rate and peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (SpO2) from facial video. VideoPulse contains 157 recordings totaling 2.6 hours from 52 neonates with diverse face orientations. Our pipeline performs face alignment and artifact aware supervision using denoised pulse oximeter signals, then applies 3D CNN backbones for heart rate and SpO2 regression with label distribution smoothing and weighted regression for SpO2. Predictions are produced in 2 second windows. On the NBHR neonatal dataset, we obtain heart rate MAE 2.97 bpm using 2 second windows (2.80 bpm at 6 second windows) and SpO2 MAE 1.69 percent. Under cross dataset evaluation, the NBHR trained heart rate model attains 5.34 bpm MAE on VideoPulse, and fine tuning an NBHR pretrained SpO2 model on VideoPulse yields MAE 1.68 percent. These results indicate that short unaligned neonatal video segments can support accurate heart rate and SpO2 estimation, enabling low cost non invasive monitoring in neonatal intensive care.