Collaborative-Set Measurement for ECG-Based Human Identification

Electrocardiogram (ECG) has attracted intense research interests and contests due to its great value in biometric applications, especially with the technological progress of smart instrumentation and artificial intelligence nowadays. For the issue of ECG-based human identification, distance measure in a suitable data space can be an effective solution. Almost all conventional distance measures rely on the independent data samples for classification. However, such measuring mechanism is vulnerable to the variation and bias of data distribution, which are easily caused by the noisy artifacts in this issue. To tackle this problem, we suggest doing distance measurement at the level of multiple-set bundle that consists of multiple sample sets obtained under different conditions. More specifically, we propose a novel method, “Collaborative-Set Measurement (CSM),” which creatively extends distance measure from the sample level through the set level to the bundle level. CSM not only captures the representative information from within-set distribution but also exploits the discriminative information from between-set collaboration, and meanwhile incorporates the robust information from in-bundle fusion. Attributing to these information, this method can largely enhance the identification performance in this issue despite the serious noisy artifacts influencing the data samples. The experimental results have demonstrated the capability of CSM for ECG-based human identification, by means of the public challenging database, DREAMER, on which the proposed method produces an accuracy of 91.30%. In summary, this proposal has initially brought forward a new thought of “collaborative sets.” This thought may provide inspirations for further researches on biometric recognition and general signal classification topics.