Person identification using EEG channel selection with hybrid flower pollination algorithm

Recently, electroencephalogram (EEG) signal presents a great potential for a new biometric system to deal with a cognitive task. Several studies defined the EEG with uniqueness features, universality, and natural robustness that can be used as a new track to prevent spoofing attacks. The EEG signals are the graphical recording of the brain electrical activities which can be measured by placing electrodes (channels) in various positions of the scalp. With a large number of channels, some channels have very important information for biometric system while others not. The channel selection problem has been recently formulated as an optimisation problem and solved by optimisation techniques. This paper proposes hybrid optimisation techniques based on binary flower pollination algorithm (FPA) and beta-hill climbing (called FPA beta-hc) for selecting the most relative EEG channels (i.e., features) that come up with efficient accuracy rate of personal identification. Each EEG signals with three different groups of EEG channels have been utilized (i.e., time domain, frequency domain, and time-frequency domain). The FPA beta-hc is measured using a standard EEG signal dataset, namely, EEG motor movement/imagery dataset with a real world data taken from 109 persons each with 14 different cognitive tasks using 64 channels. To evaluate the performance of the FPA beta-hc, five measurement criteria are considered:accuracy (Acc), (ii) sensitivity (Sen), (iii) F-score (F_s), (v) specificity (Spe), and (iv) number of channels selected (No. Ch). The proposed method is able to identify the personals with high Acc, Sen., F_s, Spe, and less number of channels selected. Interestingly, the experimental results suggest that FPA beta-hc is able to reduce the number of channels with accuracy rate up to 96% using time-frequency domain features. For comparative evaluation, the proposed method is able to achieve results better than those produced by binary-FPA-OPF method using the same EEG motor movement/imagery datasets. In a nutshell, the proposed method can be very beneficial for effective use of EEG signals in biometric applications. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.