  Objective: Non-contact physiological measurement is a growing research area
that allows capturing vital signs such as heart rate (HR) and breathing rate
(BR) comfortably and unobtrusively with remote devices. However, most of the
approaches work only in bright environments in which subtle
photoplethysmographic and ballistocardiographic signals can be easily analyzed
and/or require expensive and custom hardware to perform the measurements.
  Approach: This work introduces a low-cost method to measure subtle motions
associated with the carotid pulse and breathing movement from the neck using
near-infrared (NIR) video imaging. A skin reflection model of the neck was
established to provide a theoretical foundation for the method. In particular,
the method relies on template matching for neck detection, Principal Component
Analysis for feature extraction, and Hidden Markov Models for data smoothing.
  Main Results: We compared the estimated HR and BR measures with ones provided
by an FDA-cleared device in a 12-participant laboratory study: the estimates
achieved a mean absolute error of 0.36 beats per minute and 0.24 breaths per
minute under both bright and dark lighting.
  Significance: This work advances the possibilities of non-contact
physiological measurement in real-life conditions in which environmental
illumination is limited and in which the face of the person is not readily
available or needs to be protected. Due to the increasing availability of NIR
imaging devices, the described methods are readily scalable.
