Pulse Active Ratio (PAR): A new feature extraction technique for ECG biometric authentication

A new feature extraction method known as Pulse Active Ratio (PAR) implemented on electrocardiogram (ECG) signals for biometric authentication is presented. It is developed based on the principle of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) which is widely used in the field of power and communication engineering. A total of 486 ECGs from 113 subjects taken from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) database are used in this study. Biometric performance profile such as the area under ROC (AUR) and equal error rate (EER) are used in the simulations. It is shown that PAR outperforms conventional temporal and amplitude feature extraction techniques.