Biometric Recognition of PPG Cardiac Signals Using Transformed Spectrogram Images

Nowadays, the number of mobile, wearable, and embedded devices integrating sensors for acquiring cardiac signals is constantly increasing. In particular, plethysmographic (PPG) sensors are widely diffused thanks to their small form factor and limited cost. For example, PPG sensors are used for monitoring cardiac activities in automotive applications and in wearable devices as smartwatches, activity trackers, and wristbands. Recent studies focused on using PPG signals to secure mobile devices by performing biometric recognitions. Although their results are promising, all of these methods process PPG acquisitions as one-dimensional signals. In the literature, feature extraction techniques based on transformations of the spectrogram have been successfully used to increase the accuracy of signal processing techniques designed for other application scenarios. This paper presents a preliminary study on a biometric recognition approach that extracts features from different transformations of the spectrogram of PPG signals and classifies the obtained feature representations using machine learning techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in the literature on biometric systems that extracts features from the spectrogram of PPG signals. Furthermore, with respect to most of the state-of-the-art biometric recognition techniques, the proposed approach presents the advantage of not requiring the search of fiducial points, thus reducing the computational complexity and increasing the robustness of the signal preprocessing step. We performed tests using a dataset of samples collected from 42 individuals, obtaining an average classification accuracy of \(99.16\%\) for identity verification (FMR of 0.56% at FNMR of 13.50%), and a rank-1 identification error of \(7.24\%\) for identification. The results obtained for the considered dataset are better or comparable with respect to the ones of the best-performing methods in the literature.