Enhancing Accuracy in a Touch Operation Biometric System: A Case on the Android Pattern Lock Scheme

Abstract

The main objective of this research study is to enhance the functionality of an Android pattern lock application by determining whether the time elements of a touch operation, in particular time on dot (TOD) and time between dot (TBD), can be accurately used as a biometric identifier. The three hypotheses that were tested through this study were the following–H1: there is a correlation between the number of touch stroke features used and the accuracy of the touch operation biometric system; H2: there is a correlation between pattern complexity and accuracy of the touch operation biometric system; H3: there is a correlation between user training and accuracy of the touch operation biometric system. Convenience sampling and a within-subjects design involving repeated measures were incorporated when testing an overall sample size of 12 subjects drawn from a university population who gave a total of 2,096 feature extracted data. Analysis was done using the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Algorithm. Through this study, it was shown that the extraction of one-touch stroke biometric feature coupled with user training was able to yield high average accuracy levels of up to 82%. This helps build a case for the introduction of biometrics into smart devices with average processing capabilities as they would be able to handle a biometric system without it compromising on the overall system performance. For future work, it is recommended that more work be done by applying other classification algorithms to the existing data set and comparing their results with those obtained with DTW.