Title: Exploiting the P300 paradigm for cognitive biometrics

Authors: Cota Navin Gupta; Ramaswamy Palaniappan; Raveendran Paramesran

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK. ' School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Telford, UK. ' Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Abstract: Automatic identification of a person's individuality is an important issue today. Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) which uses EEG as a modality is a promising area for cognitive biometrics. A BCI system could be used to recognise a sequence (say letters, colours or images) by the user. This sequence could form a 'BrainWord', which could be used for authentication in a multimodal environment with other technologies for high security applications. In this work, we studied several variations of the well-known P300 BCI paradigm. The influence of irrelevant stimuli during a task was studied by considering the popular Rapid Serial Visual Paradigm (RSVP). The variation in spatial locations of the presentation stimuli during a task was studied, by designing a Spatially Varying Paradigm. Comparison of classification accuracies and bit rates for eight participants from a BCI perspective, highlights that RSVP paradigm could be exploited effectively for biometrics.

Keywords: authentication systems; bit rate; brain-computer interface; cognitive biometrics; P300 potential; RSVP; rapid serial visual paradigm; spatially varying paradigm; individuality identification; electroencephalography; EEG; security applications; spatial locations; classification accuracy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCB.2012.046513

International Journal of Cognitive Biometrics, 2012 Vol.1 No.1, pp.26 - 38

Received: 27 May 2011
Accepted: 20 Dec 2011
Published online: 17 Dec 2014 *