ECG biometrics: A robust short-time frequency analysis

In this paper, we present the results of an analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG) as a biometric using a novel short-time frequency method with robust feature selection. Our proposed method incorporates heartbeats from multiple days and fuses information. Single lead ECG signals from a comparatively large sample of 269 subjects that were sampled from the general population were collected on three separate occasions over a seven-month period. We studied the impact of long-term variability, health status, data fusion, the number of training and testing heartbeats, and database size on ECG biometric performance. The proposed method achieves 5.58% equal error rate (EER) in verification, 76.9% accuracy in rank-1 recognition, and 93.5% accuracy in rank-15 recognition when training and testing heartbeats are from different days. If training and testing heartbeats are collected on the same day, we achieve 0.37% EER and 99% recognition accuracy for decisions based on a single heartbeat.