Channel Reduction for an EEG-Based Authentication System While Performing Motor Movements

Abstract

Commercial use of biometric authentication is becoming increasingly popular, which has sparked the development of EEG-based authentication. To stimulate the brain and capture characteristic brain signals, these systems generally require the user to perform specific activities such as deeply concentrating on an image, mental activity, visual counting, etc. This study investigates whether effective authentication would be feasible for users tasked with a minimal daily activity such as lifting a tiny object. With this novel protocol, the minimum number of EEG electrodes (channels) with the highest performance (ranked) was identified to improve user comfort and acceptance over traditional 32–64 electrode-based EEG systems while also reducing the load of real-time data processing. For this proof of concept, a public dataset was employed, which contains 32 channels of EEG data from 12 participants performing a motor task without intent for authentication. The data was filtered into five frequency bands, and 12 different features were extracted to train a random forest-based machine learning model. All channels were ranked according to Gini Impurity. It was found that only 14 channels are required to perform authentication when EEG data is filtered into the Gamma sub-band within a 1% accuracy of using 32-channels. This analysis will allow (a) the design of a custom headset with 14 electrodes clustered over the frontal and occipital lobe of the brain, (b) a reduction in data collection difficulty while performing authentication, (c) minimizing dataset size to allow real-time authentication while maintaining reasonable performance, and (d) an API for use in ranking authentication performance in different headsets and tasks.

Systematic Review of Accelerating Time-Series Biosignal Machine Learning Processes Using GPU Architectures

“…The resolution of the recorded biosignal is dependent on the quality of the electrode, and the number of bits used to represent each sample. As the technology and science around biosignals are developed further, the size of electrodes is decreased while the ability of the electrode to pick up higher-quality and higher-resolution data is increased [15]. The development of more advanced electrodes, paired with current advancements in computer storage space, has allowed manufacturers of biosignal acquisition systems to introduce systems with more electrodes monitoring the areas of interest.…”

“…This makes it expensive for the user to purchase the assistive devices while also reducing the amount of research and innovation in this area due to price constraints. Many real-time systems will also reduce the number of electrodes or limit the functionality of the systems to speed up processing times [15]. However, this often results in a lower-performance system for the end user.…”