# BTS-rPPG: Orthogonal Butterfly Temporal Shifting for Remote Photoplethysmography

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01679 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01679/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [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)
- [MMPD: Multi-Domain Mobile Video Physiology Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03840/) (2023)
- [rPPG-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training with Masked Autoencoders for Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02301/) (2023)
- [RhythmFormer: Extracting Patterned rPPG Signals based on Periodic Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12788/) (2024)
- [Spatiotemporal Self-attention Modeling with Temporal Patch Shift for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13259/) (2022)
- [Dual-path TokenLearner for Remote Photoplethysmography-based Physiological Measurement with Facial Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07771/) (2023)
- [PhysLLM: Harnessing Large Language Models for Cross-Modal Remote Physiological Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03621/) (2025)
- [BigSmall: Efficient Multi-Task Learning for Disparate Spatial and Temporal Physiological Measurements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11573/) (2023)
- [Reperio-rPPG: Relational Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Periodicity Learning in Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05946/) (2025)
- [MVRD-Bench: Multi-View Learning and Benchmarking for Dynamic Remote Photoplethysmography under Occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22826/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contactless physiological sensing from facial videos by analyzing subtle appearance variations induced by blood circulation. However, modeling the temporal dynamics of these signals remains challenging, as many deep learning methods rely on temporal shifting or convolutional operators that aggregate information primarily from neighboring frames, resulting in predominantly local temporal modeling and limited temporal receptive fields. To address this limitation, we propose BTS-rPPG, a temporal modeling framework based on Orthogonal Butterfly Temporal Shifting (BTS). Inspired by the butterfly communication pattern in the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), BTS establishes structured frame interactions via an XOR-based butterfly pairing schedule, progressively expanding the temporal receptive field and enabling efficient propagation of information across distant frames. Furthermore, we introduce an orthogonal feature transfer mechanism (OFT) that filters the source feature with respect to the target context before temporal shifting, retaining only the orthogonal component for cross-frame transmission. This reduces redundant feature propagation and encourages complementary temporal interaction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that BTS-rPPG improves long-range temporal modeling of physiological dynamics and consistently outperforms existing temporal modeling strategies for rPPG estimation.
