Human identification based on heart sound auscultation point

Abstract

The application of human identification and verification has widely been used for over the past few decades. Drawbacks of such system however, are inevitable as forgery sophisticatedly developed alongside the technology advancement. Thus, this study proposed a research on the possibility of using heart sound as biometric. The main aim is to find an optimal auscultation point of heart sounds from either aortic, pulmonic, tricuspid or mitral that will most suitable to be used as the sound pattern for personal identification. In this study, the heart sound was recorded from 92 participants using a Welch Allyn Meditron electronic stethoscope whereas Meditron Analyzer software was used to capture the signal of heart sounds and ECG simultaneously for duration of 1 minute. The system is developed by a combination Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The highest recognition rate is obtained at aortic area with 98.7% when HMM has 1 state and 32 mixtures, the lowest Equal Error Rate (EER) achieved was 0.9% which is also at aortic area. In contrast, the best average performance of HMM for every location is obtained at mitral area with 99.1% accuracy and 17.7% accuracy of EER at tricuspid area.