PhysVR: Vision-Language Model Guided Interference-aware Temporal Feature Refinement for Remote Physiological Measurement

Zixu Li, Jianjun Qian, Hang Shao, Daoheng Li, Lei Luo, Jian Yang

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contactless physiological measurement from facial videos, yet its subtle pulse-related variations are easily affected by illumination variation, head motion, facial blur, and region-of-interest instability. Existing methods mainly suppress interference during feature learning, while whether the learned temporal features remain affected by interference and how to further suppress such interference before rPPG estimation are rarely examined. To address this limitation, we propose PhysVR, a vision-language model guided interference-aware temporal feature refinement framework for rPPG estimation. Specifically, a physiological backbone produces global temporal features and a coarse rPPG prediction, from which signal-derived physiological reliability evidence is constructed from local temporal characteristics. In parallel, a frozen vision-language model processes sampled facial frames under an interference-oriented prompt, and an evidence head extracts visual interference evidence from the VLM output. Temporal cross-attention integrates the physiological and visual evidence with the global temporal features to construct interference-aware temporal context. Guided by this context, a shared temporal correction unit performs general refinement, while four interference-specific experts selectively suppress different interference through adaptive routing. The refined temporal features are then used for final rPPG estimation. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that PhysVR consistently outperforms representative methods under both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluation protocols.