Efficient non-contact heart rate detection has received much attention in the field of health testing. In previous studies on factors affecting the accuracy of remote photoplethysmography
(rPPG) detection, light intensity, facial reflection angle, and motion artifacts have been investigated, but interference from specularly reflected light has not been studied. In this paper, a total of 84 videos were first acquired from four different angles and used to study the effect of specularly reflected light on the accuracy of heart rate estimation. Then we proposed a reflected light angle estimation method which firstly segments the face into 71 regions, and then extracts the angle and illumination of each region as possible reflected light directions and weights respectively. Secondly, all sample points are fitted by sample interpolation, and the angle value corresponding to the maximum value of the weight in the fitted curve is selected as the estimated angle of reflected light direction. Finally, the reflected light angle value is used as a reference for (region of interest) ROI selection to improve the quality of the obtained (image photoplethysmography) iPPG signal. We find that the accuracy of the estimated heart rate and the SNR of the signal are higher when the reflected light angle is larger. The overall root mean squared error (RMSE), standard deviation (SD) and mean error
(MAE) of our proposed reflected light angle estimation method are 2.085, 1.745 and 0.7225, which not only have high accuracy but also have good stability. Our proposed method has low error and is superior to existing methods by comparison in publicly available databases.