Abstract
Recent studies have shown that physiological signals can be remotely
captured from human faces using a portable color camera under ambient
light. This technology, namely remote photoplethysmography (rPPG), can
be used to collect users’ physiological status who are sitting in front
of a camera, which may raise physiological privacy issues. To avoid the
privacy abuse of the rPPG technology, this paper develops PulseEdit, a
novel and efficient algorithm that can edit the physiological signals in
facial videos without affecting visual appearance to protect the user’s
physiological signal from disclosure. PulseEdit can either remove the
trace of the physiological signal in a video or transform the video to
contain a target physiological signal chosen by a user. Experimental
results show that PulseEdit can effectively edit physiological signals
in facial videos and prevent heart rate measurement based on rPPG. It is
possible to utilize PulseEdit in adversarial scenarios against some
rPPG-based visual security algorithms. We present analyses on the
performance of PulseEdit against rPPG-based liveness detection and
rPPG-based deepfake detection, and demonstrate its ability to circumvent
these visual security algorithms.