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Virginia Tech

Cardiac Signals: Remote Measurement and Applications

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

The dissertation investigates the promises and challenges for application of cardiac signals in biometrics and affective computing, and noninvasive measurement of cardiac signals. We have mainly discussed two major cardiac signals: electrocardiogram (ECG), and photoplethysmogram (PPG). ECG and PPG signals hold strong potential for biometric authentications and identifications. We have shown that by mapping each cardiac beat from time domain to an angular domain using a limit cycle, intra-class variability can be significantly minimized. This is in contrary to conventional time domain analysis. Our experiments with both ECG and PPG signal shows that the proposed method eliminates the effect of instantaneous heart rate on the shape morphology and improves authentication accuracy. For noninvasive measurement of PPG beats, we have developed a systematic algorithm to extract pulse rate from face video in diverse situations using video magnification. We have extracted signals from skin patches and then used frequency domain correlation to filter out non-cardiac signals. We have developed a novel entropy based method to automatically select skin patches from face. We report beat-to-beat accuracy of remote PPG (rPPG) in comparison to conventional average heart rate. The beat-to-beat accuracy is required for applications related to heart rate variability (HRV) and affective computing. The algorithm has been tested on two datasets, one with static illumination condition and the other with unrestricted ambient illumination condition. Automatic skin detection is an intermediate step for rPPG. Existing methods always depend on color information to detect human skin. We have developed a novel standalone skin detection method to show that it is not necessary to have color cues for skin detection. We have used LBP lacunarity based micro-textures features and a region growing algorithm to find skin pixels in an image. Our experiment shows that the proposed method is applicable universally to any image including near infra-red images. This finding helps to extend the domain of many application including rPPG. To the best of our knowledge, this is first such method that is independent of color cues.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Ph. D.
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Electrical Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Sarkar, Abhijit
Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Doerzaph, Zachary R.
  • Abbott, A. Lynn
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Xuan, Jianhua
  • Stilwell, Daniel J.
  • Parikh, Devi

Subjects

dc:subject × 8

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:12419
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78739

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Sarkar, Abhijit. Cardiac Signals: Remote Measurement and Applications. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/78739