SpeckleCam: high-resolution computational speckle contrast tomography for deep blood flow imaging.

Laser speckle contrast imaging is widely used in clinical studies to monitor blood flow distribution. Speckle contrast tomography, similar to diffuse optical tomography, extends speckle contrast imaging to provide deep tissue blood flow information. However, the current speckle contrast tomography techniques suffer from poor spatial resolution and involve both computation and memory intensive reconstruction algorithms. In this work, we present SpeckleCam, a camera-based system to reconstruct high resolution 3D blood flow distribution deep inside the skin. Our approach replaces the traditional forward model using diffuse approximations with Monte-Carlo simulations-based convolutional forward model, which enables us to develop an improved deep tissue blood flow reconstruction algorithm. We show that our proposed approach can recover complex structures up to 6 mm deep inside a tissue-like scattering medium in the reflection geometry. We also conduct human experiments to demonstrate that our approach can detect reduced flow in major blood vessels during vascular occlusion.

RobustPPG: camera-based robust heart rate estimation using motion cancellation.

Camera-based heart rate measurement is becoming an attractive option as a non-contact modality for continuous remote health and engagement monitoring. However, reliable heart rate extraction from camera-based measurement is challenging in realistic scenarios, especially when the subject is moving. In this work, we develop a motion-robust algorithm, labeled RobustPPG, for extracting photoplethysmography signals (PPG) from face video and estimating the heart rate. Our key innovation is to explicitly model and generate motion distortions due to the movements of the person's face. We use inverse rendering to obtain the 3D shape and albedo of the face and environment lighting from video frames and then render the human face for each frame. The rendered face is similar to the original face but does not contain the heart rate signal; facial movements alone cause pixel intensity variation in the generated video frames. Finally, we use the generated motion distortion to filter the motion-induced measurements. We demonstrate that our approach performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in extracting a clean blood volume signal with over 2 dB signal quality improvement and 30% improvement in RMSE of estimated heart rate in intense motion scenarios.