BIOMETRIC RECOGNITION

based on ECG Signals

TABLE OF CONTENT
1. OBJECTIVE & SCOPE
2. INTRODUCTION
3. BIOMETRIC UPDATE
4. BLOCK DIAGRAM
5. HOW IT WORKS?
6. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION
7. CONCLUSION
8. REFERENCES

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 2

INTRODUCTION
 Several biometric modalities have been investigated, e.g. physical
modalities such as the face, fingerprint, iris & behavioral modalities
like
gait, gesture & keystroke.

 Circumvention, Repetition, Biometric obfuscation.

 Several attempts have been made to search for new biometric

modalities
that are inherently resistant to the attacks mentioned.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 3

INTRODUCTION – CONT’D
 The internal characteristics of the human organism have been
investigated, such as vein patterns, body odor and cognitive biometry.

 Biomedical signals constitute another category of new modalities,

which encompasses signals.

 Biomedical signals such as ECG[2], EEG[3], & EMG[4] are regarded

as emerging biometric modalities .

 The aim of this modalities are to obtain universality, measurability,

uniqueness & robustness.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 4

Why heartbeat?
First, The heartbeat signal holds a unique signature for each
person and is stable over a long period of time.

Second, every living person must have a heartbeat signal and it

can be captured from the hands for biometric applications.

Third, liveness is an inherent property of this modality, as it

cannot be captured from deceased body parts or false modalities,
such as a gummy finger or a high-resolution video image.

Finally, unlike fingerprint, iris, or face signals, it is difficult to steal

or mimic a heartbeat signal
ECG/Heart beat

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 6

BIOMETRIC UPDATE
 19 June 2013 : New York College of Health Professions granted patent for
biometric system for monitoring guard status.

 3 September 2013: Bionym launches wearable biometric authentication

device authentication device.
 11 August 2015 : Nymi Band completes first heart beat authenticated
payment with a wearable device.
 5 March 2016 : Nymi collaborates with NXP to enable physical & logical
access control and contactless payments with Nymi Band.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 7

BIOMETRIC UPDATE – CONT’D
 11 May 2016 : B-Secur named one of Gartner’s global Cool Vendors for
2016. The firm’s biometric technology uses an ECG for authentication.
 25 July 2017 : B-Secur raises $4.6M in funding to further develop its ECG
biometric authentication technology.

 9 April 2015 : The Korea Internet & Security Agency announced that it has
established a research committee designed to standardize next generation
biometrics technology using bio-signals such as brain waves & heart beats.
 12 June, 2017 : Korea Internet & Security Agency developing biometric
authentication for mobile banking (combination of a fingerprint, heart rate &
ECG).

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 8

BLOCK DIAGRAM
 The raw ECG signals must be preprocessed to remove possible interferences by
means of filtering and smoothing.

 The extraction of fiducial, non-fiducial or hybrid features is carried out. In this

process, the greater the uniqueness of the extracted features, the greater its
ability to discriminate between the patterns.

 Finally, the patterns are recognized by machine learning algorithms.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 9

HOW IT WORKS?
 The working procedure can be divided as below:

1. Preprocessing of raw data

2. Feature extraction via symbolic representation

3. Classifier

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 10

Preprocessing of raw data
 In order to improve the feature extraction, the ECG signals must be preprocessed

to remove possible interferences that, in fact, are not part of the signal.

 After this stage, each person in the dataset is represented by one or several

heartbeats, instead of be represented by the complete ECG signal.

 The fundamentals for this preprocessing are described in the next sections.

1) Removal of baseline

2) QRS complex identification

3) Signal-averaged ECG and Z-score

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 11

 Removal of baseline
1. Interference in the ECG signal is caused by the following:
A. The signal acquisition process is susceptible to frequency variation of the power
supply,
B. Electromyographic noise,
C. Movement or perspiration that may cause interference in the electrodes [6].

2. A moving average is used in the ECG signal

to remove these kinds of interference.

3. This procedure provides an

approximation of the baseline, as shown
in Figure 2.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 12

Removal of baseline – cont’d
 After the identification of the baseline, it must be subtracted from the
raw ECG signal, so as to result in a normalized ECG signal, i.e., a ECG
signal with minor distortions, as shown in Figure 3.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 13

QRS complex identification
 The crucial point in this context is that the differences between two
different ECG signals can be attributed to the heart activities, which are
mainly expressed by the QRS complex [7][8] .

 The QRS complex, or more specifically the peak R, is the area of

greatest heart activity, in normal people [7][8].

 The peak R represents the approximate center of other activities (P, Q,

S,
T and U waves).

 Once the peaks R of an ECG signal are known, the “heartbeat-to-

heartbeat” for each person can be extracted, & can provide the results of
the ECG signal preprocessing.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 14

QRS complex identification – cont’d
 The Pan-Tompkins algorithm is used to identify the QRS complex in
the ECG signal.

 Basically, the peak R is detected by searching the highest absolute value in

the wave and, on the basis of detection, other parameters can be adjusted
to find the Q & S limits.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 15

Signal-averaged ECG and Z-score
 Signal-averaged ECG [9] is the arithmetic average of the multiple electric
signals from the heart.

 It must be calculated to smooth & reduce the amount of interference present in

the ECG signal.

 The results obtained from this

calculation are shown in Figure 5.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 16

Signal-averaged ECG and Z-score
 The normalization of the ECG signals can be carried out by means of a
Z- score function.
 This normalization is important to prevent representation techniques from
creating an ill-defined time series representation, which could cause
problems in measuring the distance (or similarity) between two
heartbeats.
 Figure 6 illustrates the problem of
comparing non-normalized heartbeats:
the heartbeats A and C have the
same shape; however, since they are
not normalized, the heartbeats A and B
have a greater similarity than
the heartbeats A and C.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 17

Feature extraction via symbolic representation
 Time series are essentially high-dimensional data.

 Unlike the continuous representation of time series, the symbolic representation

accomplishes a reduction of dimensionality, but introduces a loss of
information.

 Depending on the features extracted, this loss may be negligible.

 20 symbolic representations : SAX, ESAX, R-Kmeans, SAX-Kmeans, ESAX-

Kmeans, RSAX, SPTA, GASAX, DESAX, 1DSAX, SAXTD, ASAX, EFVD,
EWD, EFD, ENSAX, VWSAX, DWT, PAA, APCA [5].

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 18

Classifier
 K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) is widely applied in pattern recognition and data
mining for classification, which is famous for its simplicity and low error rate.

 The KNN classifier [11] with Euclidean distance is adopted to classify the
heartbeats for biometric recognition.

 This classifier has already been adopted in other schemes of biometric

recognition based on ECG signals and obtained good results [10], [12],
[13],

 Even in the special case in which κ = 1 [14], [15], [16].

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 19

EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 20

EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION -
CONT’D
 The simulations were performed with a total of 337 people divided

into two sets of data (MITDB and PTBDB).

 The method involves evaluating the time series representation

techniques as a way of extracting non-fiducial features.

 Evaluation can be divided into the following parts:

 raw data preprocessing : Figure 7(a, b, c, d, e)

 features extraction and parameterization : Figure 7(f)

 classification and identification : Figure 7(g, h)

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 21

EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION - CONT’D
PTBDB Mean Accuracy of heartbeat per fold[5]

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 22

EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION - CONT’D
MITDB Mean Accuracy of heartbeat per fold[5]

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 23

CONCLUSION
1. By means of this approach, when identifying the heartbeats, we obtained a mean
fold accuracy rate of 98.8% for the PTBDB dataset with the SAX-Kmeans and
98.3% for the MITDB dataset with the ESAX-Kmeans, which were two of the
three techniques employed.

2. The results show the potential value of identifying patterns in ECG signals
through feature extraction by employing techniques that involves time series
representation.

3. It was also found that the feature extraction undertaken through the techniques of
time series, data mining & an appropriate parameterization procedure were able to
converge and yield significant results in the biometric recognition of people.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 24

REFERENCES
1 André Lourenço, Hugo Silva, Ana Fred “Ecg-based biometrics: A real time classification approach,” in
Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), International Workshop on IEEE, 2012, pp. 1–6.

2 E. Rabhi and Z. Lachiri, “Biometric personal identification system using the ECG signal,” in Computing
in Cardiology Conference (CinC), 2013. IEEE, pp. 507–510.

3 S. Yang and F. Deravi, “Wavelet-based EEG preprocessing for biometric applications,” in Emerging
Security Technologies (EST), 2013 Fourth International Conference on. IEEE, 2013, pp. 43–46.

4 J. Cannan and H. Hu, “Automatic user identification by using forearm biometrics,” in Advanced
Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), ASME International Conference on. IEEE, 2013, pp. 710–715.

5 Henrique dos Santos Passos, Felipe Gustavo Silva Teodoro, Bruno Matarazzo Duru, Edenilton Lima de
Oliveira, Sarajane M. Peres, Clodoaldo A. M. Lima,“Symbolic representations of time series applied to
biometric recognition based on ECG signal”, by International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
(IJCNN), May 2017, 3199-3207.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 25

REFERENCES – CONT’D
6 A. Momot, “Methods of weighted averaging of ECG signals using bayesian inference and criterion

function minimization,” Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 162–169, 2009.

7 T. Lugovaya, “Biometric human identification based on electrocardiogram,”Master’s Thesis, Faculty

of Computing Technologies and Informatics, Electrotechnical University “LETI”, Saint-Petersburg,

Russian Federation, 2005.

8 C.-C. Chiu, C.-M. Chuang, and C.-Y. Hsu, “A novel personal identity verification approach using a

discrete wavelet transform of the ecg signal,” in Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering, 2008. MUE ,

IEEE, pp. 201–206, 2008.

9 A. D. Chan, M. M. Hamdy, A. Badre, and V. Badee, “Wavelet distance measure for person

identification using electrocardiograms,” Instrumentation and Measurement, IEEE Transactions on,

vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 248–253, 2008.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 26

REFERENCES – CONT’D
10 N. Venkatesh and S. Jayaraman, “Human electrocardiogram for biometrics using dtw & flda,” in

Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2010 20th International Conference on. IEEE, 2010, pp. 3838–3841.

11 T. Cover and P. Hart, “Nearest neighbor pattern classification,” IEEE transactions on information

theory, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 21–27, 1967.

12 T.-W. D. Shen, W. J. Tompkins, and Y. H. Hu, “Implementation of a one lead ECG human

identification system on a normal population,” Journal of Engineering and Computer Innovations,

vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 12–21, 2010.

13 H. dos Santos Passos, D. M. da Costa, S. M. Peres, and C. A. Lima, “Patterns detection in ecg
signal

applied to biometric recognition,” in XI computer vision Workshop , 2015.

Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 27

REFERENCES – CONT’D
14 K. N. Plataniotis, D. Hatzinakos, and J. K. Lee, “Ecg biometric recognition without fiducial

detection,” in Biometric Consortium Conference, 2006 Biometrics Symposium: Special Session on

Research at the. IEEE, 2006, pp. 1–6.

15 Y. Wang, F. Agrafioti, D. Hatzinakos, and K. N. Plataniotis, “Analysis of human electrocardiogram

for biometric recognition,” EURASIP journal on Advances in Signal Processing, vol. 2008, no. 1,

pp. 1–11, 2007.

16 F. Agrafioti and D. Hatzinakos, “Ecg based recognition using second order statistics,” in

Communication Networks and Services Research Conference, 2008. CNSR 2008. 6th Annual. IEEE,

2008, pp. 82–87.

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Biometric Recognition based on ECG signals 29