DLPrPPG: Development and Design of Deep Learning Platform for Remote Photoplethysmography

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive neural network-based development platform for remote photoplethysmography (rPPG). rPPG is a growing and popular research area, especially with the introduction of deep learning methods that can significantly improve its signal quality and heart rate prediction reliability. However, there are still many problems with the experimental methods in current studies, such as non-standardized and private data, different pre-processing methods, and incomplete or irreproducible experiment methodologies, among others. These problems prevent methods from being compared fairly and lead to lower reliability of the proposed experimental results, hindering progress in this area. For these reasons, we propose an open-source framework to facilitate the design and experimentation of deep learning-based rPPG development, and it’s made freely available on GitHub(DLPrPPG). Through our platform we provide ready-to-use implementations of CNN-AE, LSTM, GAN, and Transformer models, whose hyperparameters we can easily and quickly optimize, and efficiently compare in a fair fashion. From our experiments we show that if the parameters of different neural networks are optimized, the performance of older architectures can be on par or even outperform newer ones.