The PhD thesis defense of Serge Bobbia entitled "Towards the development of a contactless photoplethysmographic sensor", which will take place on February 15, 2019, at 10:15am in the first floor of I3M building.

Abstract :
Heart-rate estimation performed with remote photoplethysmography is a very active research field. Since pioneer works in 2010, which demonstrated the feasibility of the measure with low-grade consumers’ camera (webcam), the number of scientific publications have increased significantly in the domain. Hence, we observe a multiplication of the methods in order to retrieve the photoplethysmographic signal which has led to an increased precision and quality of the heart-rate estimation. Region of interest segmentation is a key step of the processing pipeline in order to maximize the quality of the measured signal. We propose a new method to perform remote photoplethysmographic measurement using an implicit living skin identification method. Hence, we have shown that our approach lead to an improvement in both quality of the signal measured and precision of the heart-rate estimation by favoring more contributive area. As we are working with hardware integration constraint, we propose a new superpixels segmentation method which requires significantly less computation power than state of the art methods by reducing the algorithmic complexity of this step. Moreover, we have demonstrated the integration and real time capabilities by implementing our solution to an embedded device. All of our proposed method have been evaluated through different experimentations. Our new segmentation method, called IBIS, have been compared to state of the art methods to quantify the quality of the produced segmentation. To quantify the impact of our approach on the quality of the photoplethysmographic measure, we have implemented and compared state of the art methods with our proposed method. For both the superpixels segmentation and remote heart-rate estimation, our methods have shown great results and advantages compared to state of the art ones. Our works have been reviewed by the scientific community through several conference presentations and journal publications.