An extensive study of user identification via eye movements across multiple datasets

Abstract

Several studies have reported that biometric identification based on eye movement characteristics can be used for authentication. This paper provides an extensive study of user identification via eye movements across multiple datasets based on an improved version of a method originally proposed by George and Routray. We analyzed our method with respect to several factors that affect the identification accuracy, such as the type of stimulus, the Identification by Velocity-Threshold (IVT) parameters (used for segmenting the trajectories into fixation and saccades), adding new features such as higher-order derivatives of eye movements, the inclusion of blink information, template aging, age and gender. We find that three methods namely selecting optimal IVT parameters, adding higher-order derivatives features and including an additional blink classifier have a positive impact on the identification accuracy. When we combine all our methods, we are able to improve the best known accuracy over the BioEye 2015 competition dataset from 86% to 96%.