Evaluation of features and channels of electroencephalographic signals for biometric systems

Biometric systems are essential tools in modern society where most of our personal information lives in digital form. Although there is a significant variety of biometrics, electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are a useful technique to guarantee that the person is alive, they are universal, and not falsifiable. Nevertheless, EEG processing needs to address some challenges to become a viable technique to build production-ready biometric systems. These challenges include the adequate selection of features and channels that maximize the quality of the results and optimize resources. This work provides an analysis of which are the most important features and channels for the correct operation of a biometric system. The experimental analysis worked with two datasets and evaluated 19 features belonging to three groups, wavelet-based, spectral, and complexity. Five classifiers were trained: multilayer perceptron, AdaBoost, random forest, support vector machine, and K-nearest neighbors. The results found that the best feature for developing a biometric system is the standard deviation extracted from the coefficients of a three-level discrete wavelet transform. Additionally, the experimental results with the two datasets showed that the proposed method for channel selection can reduce the necessary number of channels while maintaining its performance. Our results, from one of the datasets, showed a reduction of 21 channels (from 32 to 11) and indicated that the best channels to develop biometric systems seem to be those located on the central area of the scalp.