Non-Contact In-Car Monitoring of Heart Rate: Evaluating the Eulerian Video Magnification Algorithm in a Driving Simulator Study

Monitoring drivers’ health is crucial for saving lives in emergencies and enabling in-car health applications. The state of the art in pulse monitoring is contact-based sensors which impair the driving experience and have to be applied manually before driving. This paper focuses on automated hyper parameter optimizing the Eulerian Video Magnification (EVM) algorithm, which detects heart rates through non-contact facial camera images, for use in driving scenarios. We conducted a user study where 21 participants performed a driving simulation while their heart rates were recorded by a wearable fitness tracker (serving as ground truth) and facial images with an RGB camera. Our findings indicate that, despite using the optuna library for hyper parameter tuning, the Eulerian Video Magnification algorithm is insufficient for accurate pulse detection in a driving simulator environment.