Automated identification of cardiac signals after blind source separation for camera-based photoplethysmography

Abstract

In the field of camera-based photoplethysmography the application of blind source separation (BSS) techniques has extensively stressed to cope with frequently occurring artifacts and noise. Although said techniques can help to extract the cardiac component from a mixture of input sources, permutation indeterminacy inherit to BSS techniques often introduces inaccuracies or requires manual intervention. The current contribution focuses on methods to automatically select the cardiac component from the output of BSS techniques applied to camera-based photoplethysmograms. To that end, we propose simple Markov models to describe and subsequently identify cardiac components. It is shown that good results can be obtained by combining different simple Markov models.