ECG-based biometrics using recurrent neural networks

In this paper, we propose the use of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to develop an effective solution to two problems in electrocardiogram (ECG)-based biometrics: identification/classification and authentication. Different RNN architectures with various parameter settings were evaluated, including traditional, long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), unidirectional, and bidirectional networks. Unlike many existing methods, the RNN-based method does not require any feature extraction. The method was evaluated using two publicly available datasets: ECG-ID and MIT-BIH Arrhythmia (MITDB). For the identification problem, nearly 100% classification accuracy on the ECG-ID dataset was achieved, and similar results were observed for the MITDB dataset. For the authentication problem, an RNN was trained and the hidden state at the final time step was extracted to make a decision. We evaluated the effect of the training size on the equal error rate (EER), and showed that the EER drops from approximately 3.5% to nearly 0% as we increased the percentage of subjects used for training from approximately 15% to 80%.