ECG for blind identity verification in distributed systems

This paper discusses ECG biometric recognition in a distributed system, such as smart cards. In a setting where every card is equipped with an ECG sensor to record heart beats from the fingers, and to subsequently perform identity verification, the interest is in protecting the card holder from a set of unknown/unseen biometric traits. Prior works have examined ECG biometrics in settings where a particular subject was to be identified among a set of enrollees. However, this treatment limits the applicability of this biometric. The Autocorrelation - Linear Discriminant Analysis (AC/LDA) is revisited, to propose a strategic extension of the methodology, in order to account for recognition among unknown individuals (blind verification). The discriminant is trained individually for every smart card, on the samples of the subject to be enrolled, as well as a generic dataset of ECG recordings. This enables the recognizer to protect the template against attacks by biometric samples that have not been used to train the discriminant. In addition, we present a methodology for the selection of the matching threshold, which targets to control false acceptance while being experimentally optimized for a particular smart card.