Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a non-invasive technique to measure heart rate at a lower cost, and it has been recently widely used in smart wearable devices. However, as PPG is easily affected by noises under high-intensity movement, the measured heart rate in sports has low precision. To tackle the problem, this paper proposed a heart rate extraction algorithm based on self-adaptive heart rate separation model. The algorithm firstly preprocessed acceleration and PPG signals, from which cadence and heart rate history were extracted respectively. A self-adaptive model was made based on the connection between the extracted information and current heart rate, and to output possible domain of the heart rate accordingly. The algorithm proposed in this article removed the interference from strong noises by narrowing the domain of real heart rate. From experimental results on the PPG dataset used in 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Cup, the average absolute error on 12 training sets was 1.12 beat per minute (bpm) (Pearson correlation coefficient: 0.996; consistency error: ?0.184 bpm). The average absolute error on 10 testing sets was 3.19 bpm (Pearson correlation coefficient: 0.990; consistency error: 1.327 bpm). From experimental results, the algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively extract heart rate information under noises and has the potential to be put in usage in smart wearable devices.
