No abstract

The main purpose of this study is to present a novel personal authentication approach with the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. The electrocardiogram is a recording of the electrical activity of the heart and the recorded signals can be used for individual verification because ECG signals of one person are never the same as those of others. The discrete wavelet transform was applied for extracting features that are the wavelet coefficients derived from digitized signals sampled from one-lead ECG signal. By the proposed approach applied on 35 normal subjects and 10 arrhythmia patients, the verification rate was 100% for normal subjects and 81% for arrhythmia patients. Furthermore, the performance of the ECG verification system was evaluated by the false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR). The FAR was 0.83% and FRR was 0.86% for a database containing only 35 normal subjects. When 10 arrhythmia patients were added into the database, FAR was 12.50% and FRR was 5.11%. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach worked well for normal subjects. For this reason, it can be concluded that ECG used as a biometric measure for personal identity verification is feasible.