Cancelable ECG biometrics using GLRT and performance improvement using guided filter with irreversible guide signal

Biometrics such as ECG provides a convenient and powerful security tool to verify or identify an individual. However, one important drawback of biometrics is that it is irrevocable. In other words, biometrics cannot be re-used practically once it is compromised. Cancelable biometrics has been investigated to overcome this drawback. In this paper, we propose a cancelable ECG biometrics by deriving a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detector from a composite hypothesis testing in randomly projected domain. Since it is common to observe performance degradation for cancelable biometrics, we also propose a guided filtering (GF) with irreversible guide signal that is a non-invertibly transformed signal of ECG authentication template. We evaluated our proposed method using ECG-ID database with 89 subjects. Conventional Euclidean detector with original ECG template yielded 93.9% PD1 (detection probability at 1% FAR) while Euclidean detector with 10% compressed ECG (1/10 of the original data size) yielded 90.8% PD1. Our proposed GLRT detector with 10% compressed ECG yielded 91.4%, which is better than Euclidean with the same compressed ECG. GF with our proposed irreversible ECG template further improved the performance of our GLRT with 10% compressed ECG up to 94.3%, which is higher than Euclidean detector with original ECG. Lastly, we showed that our proposed cancelable ECG biometrics practically met cancelable biometrics criteria such as efficiency, re-usability, diversity and non-invertibility.