Cancelable ECG biometric based on combination of deep transfer learning with DNA and amino acid approaches for human authentication

Recently, electrocardiogram (ECG) signals have received a high level of attention as a physiological signal in the field of biometrics. It has presented great possibilities for its strength against counterfeit. However, the ECG feature templates are irreplaceable, and a compromised template implies a permanent loss of identity. Therefore, several studies have been introduced biometric template protection techniques such as cancelable techniques to protect the original template in case it is stolen or lost. In this research, a cancelable ECG approach is proposed to protect the ECG feature template for human authentication. In our system, we first employed some image processing techniques for preprocessing the input ECG signals. Then, a deep transfer learning approach is employed to extract the deep ECG features. Later, the proposed cancelable approach based on DNA and amino acid is applied to protect the deep feature templates. Lastly, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed for authentication. Extensive experiments on two commonly used datasets coupled with comprehensive theoretical analysis demonstrate the highest accuracy of the proposed system and the strong resilience of the system to various security and privacy attacks. Results show that the proposed cancelable method meets all requirements of cancelable biometrics such as irreversibility, revocability, and unlinkability. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).