ECGsound for human identification

Abstract

Novel biometric systems have emerged in recent years as an alternative or complement to traditional identification systems based on passwords (something you know) or tokens (something you have). In this sense, biopotentials signals such as electrocardiograms (cardiac signal) or electroencephalograms (brain signals) have attracted many researchers’ attention. This work proposes an innovative identification technique based on electrocardiograms (ECGs) and musical features (e.g., dynamics, rhythm or timbre) commonly used to characterise audio files. In a nutshell, after pre-processing ECG recordings, we transform them into audio wave files, split them into segments, extract features into five musical dimensions and finally fed a classifier with these instances. The proposal’s workability is confirmed by experimentation using the MIT-BIH Normal Sinus Rhythm Database with 18 subjects and offering an accuracy of 96.6 and a low error rate with FAR and FRR 0.002 and 0.004, respectively.