ECG biometric recognition using SVM‐based approach

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for biometric personal identification based on electrocardiogram (ECG) features. ECG, which reflects cardiac electrical activity, is a distinctive characteristic of a person and can be used for security needs. Twenty‐one features based on temporal and amplitude distances between detected fiducial points and 10 morphological descriptors are extracted from each heartbeat. Then, support vector machine (SVM) is used as a classifier. A comparative study between two kernels, Gaussian and polynomial, was made in order to determine the best kernel and the appropriate values of hyperparameters that improve the recognition performance. The algorithm is evaluated using two databases, namely MIT‐BIH Arrhythmia and MIT‐BIH Normal Sinus Rhythm. Analysis of the results shows that the combination of all features allows improvement of our system efficiency with regard to healthy human subjects and those with arrhythmia. © 2016 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.