Verification of humans using the electrocardiogram

A feasibility study on the potential of the electrocardiogram (ECG) for biometrical applications is presented. A test set of 234 ECG recordings from 74 subjects was compiled emulating a realistic scenario for ECG biometrics by using short measurements of 10 s length in combination with a practicable choice of ECG leads. The long-term stability of the individual ECG was investigated during time periods up to several years. Verification and identification was done by utilizing the heart vector and a simple distance measure. As a result, encouraging error rates were obtained; for verification, for instance, the achieved equal error rate was smaller than 3%.