How Time Window Influences Biometrics Performance: An EEG-Based Fingerprint Connectivity Study

EEG-based biometrics represent a relatively recent research field that aims to recognize individuals based on their recorded brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). Among the numerous features that have been proposed, connectivity-based approaches represent one of the more promising methods tested so far. In this paper, using the phase lag index (PLI) and the phase locking value (PLV) methods, we investigate how the performance of a connectivity-based EEG biometric system varies with respect to different time windows (using epochs of different lengths ranging from 0.5 s to 12 s with a step of 0.5 s) to understand if it is possible to define the optimal duration of the EEG signal required to extract those distinctive features. All the analyses were performed on two freely available EEG datasets, including 109 and 23 subjects, respectively. Overall, as expected, the results have shown a pronounced effect of the time window length on the biometric performance measured in terms of EER (equal error rate) and AUC (area under the curve), with an evident increase in the biometric performance as the time window increases. Furthermore, our initial findings strongly suggest that enlarging the window size beyond a specific maximum threshold fails to enhance the performance of biometric systems. In conclusions, we want to highlight that EEG connectivity has the potential to represent an optimal candidate as an EEG fingerprint and that, in this context, it is essential to establish an adequate time window capable of capturing subject-specific features. Furthermore, we speculate that the poor performance obtained with short time windows mainly depends on the difficulty of correctly estimating the connectivity metrics from very small EEG epochs (shorter than 8 s).