Non-contact measurements of the cardiac pulse of humanity is always a challenging problem. Almost all the existing research work concentrates on heart rate measurements based on video recordings of the human face, in which the subject is restricted rigidly. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on skin detection method. The skin regions in color video recordings are generalized to anywhere of the human body, not limited to human face. The skin detector and a chrominance-based technique are firstly used to detect the photo-plethysmo-graphy (PPG) signal. Then, we use an empirical parameter selection method to get the final heart rate estimation. The experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2018 SPIE.