Graph based Method for Enhanced Heart Rate Trace Estimation using UWB Impulse Radar

In this paper, we propose a graph based method to improve the heart rate trace estimation in UWB impulse radar. The key idea is to extract the heart rate from spectrograms using graph weight and normalised cuts image segmentation. Radar heartbeat signal is generally weak and inevitably couple with motion interference including involuntary body motion and respiration. When the pulse signal to interference plus noise ratio is low, the graph-based method outperforms the conventional spectral peak finding method. The spectrograms by complex data has better estimation performance than phase data. The harmonic signal promoted by complex data is helpful to the heart rate estimation when the fundamental heart rate signal is weak or masked by respiration interference. We validate the graph-based method through experimental demonstration.