An Effective Photoplethysmography Denosing Method Based on Diffusion Probabilistic Model

Abstract

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is commonly used to gather health-related information but is highly affected by motion artifacts from daily activities. Inspired by the strong denoising capabilities and generalization of diffusion probabilistic models, this paper proposes a novel PPG denoising method using a diffusion probabilistic model to reduce the impact of these artifacts. While typical diffusion models handle Gaussian noises, motion artifacts often involve non-Gaussian noise. To address this, the proposed method incorporates noisy PPG signals into both the diffusion and reverse processes, allowing the model to adapt better to complex and non-Gaussian noises. A dataset with clean and noisy PPG signals from 15 subjects performing various motion tasks was collected for evaluation. The results show the proposed model significantly improves PPG signal quality, reducing the Peak-Rejection-Rate (PRR) from 0.24 to 0.03. It also enhances the accuracy of heart rate (HR) estimation and various heart rate variability (HRV) measures, showing robustness and good generalization across different tasks and subjects.