The paper introduces Heartian, a physiology‑aware framework that augments Gaussian head avatars with cardiac‑cycle‑dependent albedo modulation, enabling the encoding of remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) signals. By supervising with synchronized contact PPG, the method models the cardiac waveform as a sum of two Gaussians and learns per‑frame spatial residuals via a lightweight MLP. Experiments on 152 stationary recordings from UBFC‑rPPG, PURE, and MMPD show heart‑rate estimation errors as low as 0.29 bpm MAE and 0.38 % MAPE, while preserving reconstruction quality with negligible PSNR loss.
By Xiaoyue Fan, Jose Echevarria, Akshay Paruchuri, Kaan Ak\c{s}it
Gaussian head avatars typically model intrinsic facial appearance as temporally static, omitting subtle cardiac-induced skin-color variation. We propose $\unicode{x1F493}$Heartian, a physiology-aware...
arXiv:2606. 12378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments.
By Zhi Wei Xu, Torbj\"orn E. M. Nordling
Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contactless pulse estimation from facial videos, serving as a vital tool for health monitoring. However, current deep learning methods often struggle under complex disturbances, particularly varying illumination, facial expressions, and unconstrained head movements.
The study examined how well physiological properties from contact photoplethysmography (PPG) can be recovered by camera-based remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) across 655 recordings. Using the CHROM method, the authors found that while heart‑rate estimates showed modest accuracy, other dynamic measures such as autocorrelation, spectral content, and Lyapunov exponents largely failed to preserve recording‑specific characteristics. They also observed that lighting and motion influence endpoint accuracy, yet these factors did not explain the lack of dynamical correspondence.
By Timothy Oladunni, Farouk Ganiyu-Adewumi
Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) estimates the blood volume pulse (BVP) signal from facial videos, enabling contact-free health monitoring. Conventional clip-wise approaches, which use video clips as input, require capturing over one hundred frames before inference, thus introducing several seconds of delay and hindering real-time use.