ECG based biometric authentication using ensemble of features

In this work, the efficacy of various features on electrocardiogram (ECG) based biometric authentication process is thoroughly examined. In particular, the features acquired from temporal analysis, wavelet transformation, power spectral density estimation and QRS-complex detection over ECG signals are considered. These features are employed with two distinct classification algorithms, namely decision tree and Bayes network, specifically for gender, age and identity recognition problems. The biometric authentication framework is evaluated on a benchmark dataset that contains ECG records of 18 healthy people including 5 men, aged 26 to 45, and 13 women, aged 20 to 50. The results of the experimental analysis reveal that if all those features are used in combination rather than individually, better performance is attained for all classifiers in each recognition problem.