STARFAST: a Wireless Wearable EEG Biometric System based
on the ENOBIO Sensor
H.S.PAVAN KUMAR
Madina engineering college
ABSTRACT—we present a wearable,
wireless biometry system based on the new
ENOBIO 4- channel electrophysiology
recording device developed at Star lab.
Features extracted from
electroencephalogram (EEG) and
electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings have
proven to be unique enough between
subjects for biometric applications. We
show here that biometry based on these
recordings offers a novel way to robustly
authenticate or identify subjects. In this
paper, we present a rapid and unobtrusive
authentication method that only uses 2
frontal electrodes and a wrist worn electrode
referenced to another one placed at the ear
lobe. Moreover, the system makes use of a
multistage fusion architecture, which
demonstrates to improved system
performance. The performance analysis of
the system presented in this paper stems
from an experiment with 416 test trials,
where an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 0% is
obtained after the EEG and ECG modalities
fusion and using a complex boundary
decision. If a lineal boundary decision is
used we obtain a True Acceptance Rate
(TAR) of 97.9% and a False Acceptance
C.ABDUL KHALEEK
Madina engineering college
Rate (FAR) of 0.82%. The obtained
performance measures improve the results
of similar systems presented in earlier work.
I. INTRODUCTION
The present paper introduces a method to
authenticate people from their physiological
activity, concretely the combination of ECG
and EEG data. We call this system
STARFAST (STAR Fast Authentication
bio-Scanner Test). Several biometric
modalities are already being exploited
commercially for person authentication:
voice recognition, face recognition and
fingerprint recognition are among the more
common modalities nowadays. But other
types of biometrics are being studied as
well: ADN analysis, keystroke, gait, palm
print, ear shape, hand geometry, vein
patterns, iris, retina and written signature
[33]. Although these different techniques for
authentication exist nowadays, they present
some problems. Typical biometric traits,
such as fingerprint, voice and retina, are not
universal, and can be subject to physical
damage (dry skin, scars, loss of voice...). In
fact, it is estimated that 2-3% of the
population is missing the feature that is
required for authentication, or that the
provided biometric sample is of poor
quality. Furthermore, these systems are
subject of attacks such as presenting a
registered deceased person, dismembered
body part or introduction of fake biometric
samples. It also compares the performance
of the system with the Active Two system
from Biosemi. The Active Two system is
state of the art commercial equipment that is
proven to have very good performance and
has been used in many studies. A list of
some works can be found in [1]. So far 3
demonstration applications have been
developed using the system. EOG based
Human Computer Interface (HCI), EEG and
ECG based Biometry for Authentication
(presented at pHealth as a poster) and an
EEG based Sleepiness Prediction system for
drivers. In all cases the applications are
designed around the same 4 channel system.
ENOBIO has been developed with the help
of the SENSATION FP6 IP 507231.
With the evolution of m-Health, an
increasing number of biomedical sensors
will be worn on or implanted in an a
individual in the future for the monitoring,
diagnosis, and treatment of diseases. For the
optimization of resources, it is therefore
necessary to investigate how to interconnect
these sensors in a wireless body area
network, wherein security of private data
transmission is always a major concern. This
paper proposes a novel solution to tackle the
problem of entity authentication in body
area sensor network (BASN) for m-Health.
Physiological signals detected by biomedical
sensors have dual functions: (1) for a
specific medical application, and (2) for
sensors in the same BASN to recognize each
other by biometrics. A feasibility study of
proposed entity authentication scheme was
carried out on 12 healthy individuals, each
with 2 channels of photoplethysmogram
(PPG) captured simultaneously at different
parts of the body. The beat-to-beat heartbeat
interval is used as a biometric characteristic
to generate identity of the individual. The
results of statistical analysis suggest that it is
a possible biometric feature for the entity
authentication of BASN.
Advantages Since every
living and functional person has a recordable
EEG/ECG signal, the EEG/ECG feature is
universal. Moreover brain or heart damage
is something that rarely occurs, so it seems
to be quite invariant across time. Finally it
seems very difficult to fake an EEG/ECG
signature or to attack an EEG/ECG
biometric system. An ideal biometric
system should present the following
characteristics: 100% reliability, user
friendliness, fast operation and low cost. The
perfect biometric trait should have the
following characteristics: very low intra-
subject variability, very high inter-subject
variability, very high stability over time and
universality. In the next section we show the
general architecture and the global
performance of the system we have
developed.
SYSTEM DESCRIPTION AND
SPECIFICATIONS:
ENOBIO is a wearable, wireless, 4-
channel, all-digital electrophysiology
recording system that has been optimized for
dry electrodes. The system has been
designed in a modular way to allow
researchers to build systems tailored to their
needs. Robust, snap-in cables of any length
allow any combination of EEG, EOG and
ECG in a single wearable system without
loss of signal quality. ENOBIO employs
three fundamental enabling aspects to bring
electrophysiology into daily life:
- Active digital electrodes digitize
the signal on site in order to reduce
environmental noise.
- Modular design allows users to customize
a single system for various applications
- Wireless communication allows wearable
recording of data away from the lab or
controlled environments. The precision of
the signal that can be acquired with
ENOBIO is 1-3 uVpp to 1 mV from 0.1 to
100 Hz, and the output is a digital signal at
256 Samples/s per channel, 16 bit. Up to
four channels plus electrical reference can
be recorded. The hardware is power with a
rechargeable Li-Ion battery for long
duration. The communication of ENOBIO
with the Laptop is done via ZigBee to USB
receiver. The electrodes can be active
Ag/AgCl or optionally dry. We can see in
Figure 1 ENOBIO recording EEG data and
transmitting them wirelessly to the laptop to
be processed for an on-line application.
METHODS AND RESULTS:
In this paper, we present a rapid and
unobtrusive authentication/identification
method that only uses 2 frontal electrodes
(for EEG recording) with another electrode
placed on the left wrist (for ECG
recording)and all 3 referenced to another
one placed at the right earlobe. Moreover the
system makes use of a multi-stage fusion
architecture, which has been demonstrated
to improve system performance. The
EEG/ECG recording device is ENOBIO [23,
24, 32, 35], a product developed at
STARLAB BARCELONA SL. It is a
wireless 4 channel (plus the common mode)
device with active electrodes. It is therefore
quite unobtrusive, fast and easy to place.
Even though ENOBIO can work in dry
mode, in this study conductive gel has been
used (see fig. 1).
 decision. The enrolment and the
authentication test follow a common path
until the feature extraction. Then the red
arrows indicates the enrolment path and the
green ones the authentication path. Briefly,
the preprocessing module segments the
recorded takes into 4 seconds epochs. From
each one of those epochs we extract 5
Figure1: ENOBIO sensor embedded in a
different features: auto-regression
cap. We can see the 4 channel inputs (red
coefficients, fast Fourier transform, mutual
pins). In the picture, only two channels are
information, coherence and cross correlation
plugged. The data are transmitted wirelessly
[10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21]. The classifier used
to the laptop. The general schema used is
in both the signature extraction module and
described below: Fig. 2 General scheme of
in the recognition module is the Fisher
the method. The data acquisition module is
Discriminant Analysis [13], with 4 different
the software that controls the ENOBIO
discriminant functions (linear, diagonal
sensor in order to capture the raw data.
linear, quadratic and diagonal quadratic).
Remember that 4 channels are recorded: 2
During the enrolment process, we need four
EEG channels placed in the forehead, 1
3-minutes takes, and these are used to select
ECG channel placed in the left wrist and 1
the best combinations of features and
electrode placed in the right earlobe for
classifiers, and then to train the classifiers
referencing the data. At this point the data is
for each subject. This new feature is what
separate in EEG data and ECG data and sent
we call ‘personal classifier’ approach, and it
to two parallel but different biometric
improves the performance of the system
modules for EEG and ECG. (the difference
considerably. The authentication test takes
is not shown in the scheme for simplicity).
are 1-minute long. The preprocessing and
For the signature extraction module, four 3-
the feature extraction are equivalent to the
minutes takes are needed. Once the
enrolment case. The recognition module
signatures are extracted, they are both stored
loads the trained classifiers for each
in the database for further retrieval when an
modality (ECG and EEG) and an
authentication process takes place. Then the
independent score is then provided for each.
recognition module provides an
authentication score for both modalities and INITIAL SYSTEM
finally the fusion module provides the final BENCHMARKING:
 For the signal analysis we compared
the signal recorded with ENOBIO and
Biosemi simultaneously. The electrodes of
every system where placed in Fp1 of 1 cm
between them. We analyzed the signal
referenced to left ear lobe. We recorded
spontaneous EEG, 1 minute with eyes open
And 1 minute with the eyes closed for 2
subjects, using wet Ag/AgCl electrodes for
both systems. Figures 2 to 5 show the power
spectral density of the signals recorded with
ENOBIO (blue line) and Biosemi (red line).
We can see a very good match in the
spectrums of both systems. Just a small peak
of 50 Hz appears for ENOBIO for subject 1.
Figure 2: Power spectral density of the
signal recorded with ENOBIO and Biosemi
in fp1 referenced to left ear lobe. Sample
was 1 minute of spontaneous EEG with eyes
open.
Figure 3: Spectral density of the signal
recorded with ENOBIO and Biosemi in fp1
referenced to left ear lobe. Sample was 1
minute of spontaneous EEG with eyes close.
DEMONSTRATION
APLICATIONS:
Tree different applications have been
built on ENOBIO system. In this section we
make a fast overview of them. A EOG based
Human Computer Interface. Star lab
developed a system to track eye movements.
When we look at a scenario, we focus our
objects of interest changing our view with
fast eye movements. These movements are
detected by the system and their amplitude
And direction extracted from the EOG
signal. The signal is acquired by ENOBIO
and sent wirelessly to the ENOBIO server
installed in a laptop. This raw signal can be
sent via TCP/IP to any application, in that
case to the EOG HCI system.
The application processes the
data in real time and outputs a vector that
represents the movement on the screen. The
System is set on a cap as shown in Figures 1
and 8.
Figure 4: EOG-HMI system. 3 electrodes
are placed on the forehead; the 4th one and
the electrical reference are placed in the ear
lobes with a clip. Figure 7 shows a graphical
representation of the output of a movement.
Figure 5: The vector of the picture
represents the eye gaze movement of a user
of the EOG Human Computer Interface. The
absolute error in the prediction for the
movements is 5, 9 % with a standard
deviation of 6.6 for the X axe, and 9, 9%
with a standard deviation of 13, 1 for the Y
axe. Then the fusion module [22] provides a
final decision about the subject
authentication. In order to test the
performance of our system we use 48 legal
situations (when a subject claims to be
himself), 350 impostor situations (when an
enrolled subject claims to be another subject
from the database) and 16 intruder situations
(when a subject who is not enrolled in the
system claims to be a subject belonging to
the database). Once the EEG and the ECG
biometrics results are fused, using a
complex boundary decision (dotted line 2 in
fig. 3), we can obtain an ideal performance,
that is True Acceptance Rate (TAR) = 100%
and False Acceptance Rate (FAR) = 0%. If a
linear boundary decision is used (line 1 in
fig. 3), we obtain a TAR = 97.9% and a
FAR = 0.82%. The results are summarized
in table I. Bidimensional decision space. An
ordinate represent the ECG probabilities and
abscises the EEG probabilities. Red crosses
represent impostor/intruder cases and green
crosses represent legal cases. Two decision
functions are represented this system has
been tested as well to validate the initial
state of users, and has been proved sensitive
enough to detect it. If a subject has suffered
from sleep deprivation [28], alcohol intake
[26, 27] or drug ingestion when passing an
authentication test, the authentication
performance decreases. This fact provides
evidence that such a system is able to detect
not only the identity of a subject but his state
as well.
TABLE I
 validate in a continuous way that the person
supposed to be tele-present in an audiovisual
interactive space is actually the person that
is supposed to be. This could facilitate the
personalization of the reaction of the virtual
environment [31], or secure interactions that
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
guarantee the authenticity of the person
WORK:
behind. Although the system described here
These results show that the
was oriented towards person identification,
authentication of people from physiologic
its performance has been significantly
data can be achieved using techniques of
modified by introducing physiological data
machine learning. Concretely it shows that
obtained in altered states such as the ones
the fusion of two (or more) independent
resulting from sleep deprivation. This
biometric modules increases the
indicates that such a system could be used to
performance of the system by applying a
extract dynamically changing, such as
fusion stage after obtaining the biometric
physiological activity related to mood or to
scores. This result shows that processing the
intense cognitive activity. For example, it
different physiological modalities separately
could be used to extract the features
on different processing modules, and
described (sleep deprivation, alcohol intake),
introducing a data fusion step, the resulting
but also information about basic emotions
performance can be increased. Applying a
(see, for example, [34]). The dynamic
very similar approach, we could easily adapt
extraction of such features could be used to
the system to do emotion recognition [29,
evaluate the response of people in virtual
30, and 34] from physiological data, or
environments, as well as adapt the behavior
develop a Brain Computer Interface, just
of such environments to the information
starting from different ground truth data.
extracted dynamically. The advantage that
From our point of view, this easy to extend
such a system would present compared to
feature of our system is the more interesting
currently existing approaches is that –by
part of our study along with the ‘personal
having built a decisional system that is
classifier’ approach which improves
completely modular- we could estimate each
considerably the performance of the system.
class independently of the other classes
The system described could have different
obtained, which would allow us to have a
applications for Virtual Reality. It can
modular approach to define the interaction
between the human and the machine. Finally [4] Mohammad G. et al. (2006) Person
we would like to highlight the usefulness of identification by using AR model
using a single system for user state For EEG signals. Proc. 9th International
monitoring and user personalization. Conference on Bioengineering
Assuming that the system is worn anyway Technology (ICBT2006), Czech Republic,5
for physiological feedback, this same system pp.
can personalize your experience because it [5] Para jape R. et al.(2001)The
knows who you are without any interaction electroencephalogram as a biometric.
required by the user. Proc. Canadian Conf. On Electrical and
ENOBIO is an electrophysiology recording Computer Engineering, pp.
wireless system. The quality of the signal is 1363-1366.
proven to be as good as the signal that can [6] Poulos M. et al. (1998) Person
be acquires with state of the art wired identification via the EEG using
equipment. Different applications can be Computational geometry algorithms.
built on the ENOBIO system. We presented Proceedings of the Ninth
a biometric application, a Human Machine European Signal Processing, EUSIPCO’98,
Interface and a Sleepiness prediction system. Rhodes, Greece.
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