Initial Study Using Electrocardiogram for Authentication and Identification

Abstract

Recently, several studies have demonstrated the potential of electrocardiogram (ECG) to be used as a physiological signature for biometric systems (BS). We investigated the potential of ECG as a biometric trait for the identification and authentication of individuals. We used data from a public database, CYBHi, containing two off-the-person records from 63 subjects, separated by 3 months. For the BS, two templates were generated: (1) cardiac cycles (CC) and (2) scalograms. The identification with CC was performed with LDA, kNN, DT, and SVM, whereas a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a distance-based algorithm were used for scalograms. The authentication was performed with a distance-based algorithm, with a leave-one-out cross validation, for impostors evaluation. The identification system yielded accuracies of 79.37% and 69.84% for CC with LDA and scalograms with CNN, respectively. The authentication yielded an accuracy of 90.48% and an impostor score of 13.06% for CC, and it had an accuracy of 98.42% and an impostor score of 14.34% for scalograms. The obtained results support the claim that ECG can be successfully used for personal recognition. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to thoroughly compare templates and methodologies to optimize the performance of an ECG-based biometric system.

Biometric Recognition: A Systematic Review on Electrocardiogram Data Acquisition Methods

“…Biometric recognition uses distinctive physiological and behavioral characteristics to automatically identify individuals. The former characteristics can include the face, fingerprint, iris, and hand geometry, whereas the latter can be gait signature and keystroke [ 1 ].…”

Ensemble Siamese Network (ESN) Using ECG Signals for Human Authentication in Smart Healthcare System

“…They found that ECG signals can still be used for authentication purposes even when the signal is distorted by various factors such as motion artifacts, electrode detachment, or changes in heart rate. Pereira et al [ 14 ] investigated the performance of ECG-based authentication when the signal is affected by sudden cardiac events. The authors found that despite the limited data availability caused by sudden cardiac events, ECG-based authentication remains effective.…”