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Abstract-Several researches have been conducted to recognize emotions using various modalities such as facial expressions, gestures, speech or physiological signals. Among all these modalities, physiological signals are especially interesting because they are mainly controlled by the autonomic nervous system. It has been shown for example that there is an undeniable relationship between emotional state and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). In this paper, we present a methodology to monitor emotional state from physiological signals acquired remotely. The method is based on a remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) algorithm that estimates remote Heart Rate Variability (rHRV) using a simple camera. We first show that the rHRV signal can be estimated with a high accuracy (more than 96% in frequency domain). Then, frequency-feature of rHRV is calculated and we show that there is a strong correlation between the rHRV feature and different emotional states. This observation has been validated on 12 out of 16 volunteers and video-induced emotions which opens the way to contactless monitoring of emotions from physiological signals.

BackgroundRemote photoplethysmography (rPPG) has been in the forefront recently for measuring cardiac pulse rates from live or recorded videos. It finds advantages in scenarios requiring remote monitoring, such as medicine and fitness, where contact based monitoring is limiting and cumbersome. The blood volume pulse, defined as the pulsative flow of arterial blood, gives rise to periodic changes in the skin color which are then quantified to estimate a temporal signal. This temporal signal can be analysed using various methods to extract the representative cardiac signal.MethodsWe present a novel method for measuring rPPG signals using constrained independent component analysis (cICA). We incorporate a priori information into the cICA algorithm to aid in the extraction of the most prominent rPPG signal. This a priori information is implemented using two constraints: first, based on periodicity using autocorrelation, and second, a chrominance-based constraint exploiting the physical characteristics of the skin.Results and conclusionOur method showed improved performances over traditional blind source separation methods like ICA and chrominance based methods with mean absolute errors of 0.62 beats per minute (BPM) and 3.14 BPM for the two datasets in our inhouse video database UBFC-RPPG, and 4.69 BPM for the public MMSE-HR dataset. Its performance was also better in comparison to other state of the art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Our UBFC-RPPG database is also made publicly available and is specifically aimed towards testing rPPG measurements.

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A generic periodic variance maximization algorithm to extract periodic or quasi-periodic signals of unknown periods embedded into multi-channel temporal signal recordings is described in this paper. The algorithm combines the notion of maximizing a periodicity metric combined with the global optimization scheme to estimate the source periodic signal of an unknown period. The periodicity maximization is performed using Generalized Eigenvalue Decomposition (GEVD) and the global optimization is performed using tabu search. A case study of remote photoplethysmography signal estimation has been utilized to assess the performance of the method using videos from public databases UBFC-RPPG [1] and MMSE-HR [31]. The results confirm the improved performance over existing state of the art methods and the feasibility of the use of the method in a live scenario owing to its small execution time.