arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

$\unicode{x1F493}$Heartian: Physiology-Aware Relightable Gaussian Head Avatar

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