Title: Biometric verification of a subject with eye movements, with special reference to temporal variability in saccades between a subject's measurements

Authors: Youming Zhang; Jorma Laurikkala; Martti Juhola

Addresses: School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Kanslerinrinne 1, 33014, Finland ' School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Kanslerinrinne 1, 33014, Finland ' School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Kanslerinrinne 1, 33014, Finland

Abstract: We recently studied the application of saccadic eye movements, measured with video cameras, to biometric verification using subjects who receive identical stimulation. The properties of a subject's saccades may vary between measurements over the course of time, so to be useful as a means of biometric verification, the temporal variability of saccades should not distort verification results significantly. We investigated the effects of such variability by repeating the same test several times with the same groups of subjects. We found that temporal variability had only a minor effect on verification results when intervals were from a few hours to two months. Compared with the classification accuracies of approximately 90% of our earlier studies when measurements were run immediately one after another, our present verification accuracies were a few percent lower. In contrast, a long interval of approximately 16 months reduced the accuracies considerably. Our results indicate that reasonably short intervals between a subject's saccade measurements do not hinder verification based on them, while very long intervals between logins can pose a problem. Since most common electronic devices, such as computers and mobile phones, are used at frequent intervals, the analysis of saccadic eye movements seems to be a viable technique for enabling biometric verification.

Keywords: biometric verification; saccadic eye movements; saccades; classification; data analysis; temporal variability; biometrics; saccade measurements.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBM.2014.059643

International Journal of Biometrics, 2014 Vol.6 No.1, pp.75 - 94

Received: 05 Jan 2013
Accepted: 12 Nov 2013
Published online: 07 Jun 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article