Non-Contact Heart Rate Measurement from Deteriorated Videos

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) offers a state-of-the-art, non-contact methodology for estimating human pulse by analyzing facial videos. Despite its potential, rPPG methods can be susceptible to various artifacts, such as noise, occlusions, and other obstructions caused by sunglasses, masks, or even involuntary facial contact, such as individuals inadvertently touching their faces. In this study, we apply image processing transformations to intentionally degrade video quality, mimicking these challenging conditions, and subsequently evaluate the performance of both non-learning and learning-based rPPG methods on the deteriorated data. Our results reveal a significant decrease in accuracy in the presence of these artifacts, prompting us to propose the application of restoration techniques, such as denoising and inpainting, to improve heart-rate estimation outcomes. By addressing these challenging conditions and occlusion artifacts, our approach aims to make rPPG methods more robust and adaptable to real-world situations. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed methods, we undertake comprehensive experiments on three publicly available datasets, encompassing a wide range of scenarios and artifact types. Our findings underscore the potential to construct a robust rPPG system by employing an optimal combination of restoration algorithms and rPPG techniques. Moreover, our study contributes to the advancement of privacy-conscious rPPG methodologies, thereby bolstering the overall utility and impact of this innovative technology in the field of remote heart-rate estimation under realistic and diverse conditions.

Quantum neural networks with deep residual learning

Inspired by the success of neural networks in the classical machine learning tasks, there has been tremendous effort to develop quantum neural networks (QNNs), especially for quantum data or tasks that are inherently quantum in nature. Currently, with the imminent advent of quantum computing processors to evade the computational and thermodynamic limitation of classical computations,} designing an efficient quantum neural network becomes a valuable task in quantum machine learning. In this paper, a novel quantum neural network with deep residual learning (ResQNN) is proposed. {Specifically, a multiple layer quantum perceptron with residual connection is provided. Our ResQNN is able to learn an unknown unitary and get remarkable performance. Besides, the model can be trained with an end-to-end fashion, as analogue of the backpropagation in the classical neural networks. To explore the effectiveness of our ResQNN , we perform extensive experiments on the quantum data under the setting of both clean and noisy training data. The experimental results show the robustness and superiority of our ResQNN, when compared to current remarkable work, which is from \textit{Nature communications, 2020}. Moreover, when training with higher proportion of noisy data, the superiority of our ResQNN model can be even significant, which implies the generalization ability and the remarkable tolerance for noisy data of the proposed method.