A STUDY OF RESOLUTION-AWARE VIDEO COMPRESSION FOR REMOTE PHOTOPLETHYSMOGRAPHY
EAH Jena, HTW Berlin
TL;DR
Abstract
Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contactless measurement of vital signs such as the blood volume pulse (BVP) and, derived from it, the heart rate (HR). rPPG extracts BVP from skin colour variations in video, but lossy compression can attenuate these faint, quasi-periodic signals. This paper investigates how codec choice, constant-quantisation parameter (QP) settings, and spatial resolution jointly affect rPPG accuracy. In the absence of a public uncompressed HD dataset, we recorded 55 30 s 1920×1080 pixels (1080p), 30 fps clips from a total of 11 adults under stable, diffuse illumination with electrocardiogram (ECG) as ground truth. In addition, we compare the compression performance at lower resolutions with the well-established UBFC1 [1] dataset. Our investigation shows that the spatial resolution (uncompressed) has only a marginal effect on the rPPG performance, while it varies with the choice of the codec at multiple QPs, with H.266/VVC at 1080p achieving the best performance. The dataset is released with this paper.
BibTex
If you use our work in your research, please cite our publication:
@inproceedings{saitz_2026,
address = {Tampere},
title = {A study of resolution-aware video compression for remote photoplethysmography},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {IEEE} {International} {Conference} on {Image} {Processing}},
author = {Saitz, Ruben Hermann Felix, and Quinque, Jonas, and Voß, Burkart, and Trabert, Johannes Franz, and Knorr, Sebastian}, and Knorr, Sebastian},
month = September,
year = {2026},
pages = {1--6},
}