Search Results (11)

Deep learning has shown strong performance in ECG domain adaptation; however, its decision-making process remains opaque, particularly when operating on input spectrograms. Traditional fuzzy inference offers interpretability but is structurally limited to tabular or multi-channel data, making it difficult to apply directly to single-channel two-dimensional spectrograms. To address this limitation, we propose the Fuzzy Energy–Frequency Spectrogram Network (FEFSN), a new fuzzy–deep learning hybrid framework that enables direct fuzzy rule generation in the spectrogram domain. In FEFSN, the Fuzzy Rule Image Generation Module (FRIGM) decomposes an STFT-transformed ECG spectrogram into multiple energy-based channels using an Energy–density Membership Function (EMF), and then applies a Frequency Membership Function (FMF) to produce AND and OR fuzzy rule images for each energy–frequency combination. The generated rule images are subsequently normalized, activated, and combined through learned weights to form a rule-based domain-adapted spectrogram, which is then processed by a CNN. To evaluate the proposed approach, we used the PhysioNet ECG-ID dataset and compared the performance of a standard CNN with and without the FRIGM under identical training conditions. The results show that FEFSN maintains or slightly improves adaptation performance compared to the baseline CNN, despite introducing only a small number of additional parameters. More importantly, FEFSN provides ante hoc interpretability, allowing direct visualization of which energy–frequency regions were emphasized or suppressed during adaptation—an ability that conventional post hoc methods such as Grad-CAM cannot offer. Overall, FEFSN demonstrates that fuzzy logic can be effectively integrated with deep learning to achieve both reliable performance and transparent, rule-based interpretability in ECG spectrogram domain adaptation. Full article

Electrocardiographic signals (ECG) are ubiquitous, which justifies the research of their optimal storage and transmission. However, proposals for non-uniform signal sampling must take into account the priority of diagnostic data accuracy and record integrity, as well as robustness to noise and interference. In this study, two novel methods are introduced, each utilizing a distinct neural network architecture for optimizing non-uniform sampling of ECG signal. A transformer model refines each time point selection through an iterative process using gradient descent optimization, with the goal of minimizing the mean squared error between the original and resampled signals. It adaptively modifies time points, which improves the alignment between both signals. In contrast, the Temporal Convolutional Network model trains on the original signal, and gradient descent optimization is utilized to improve the selection of time points. Evaluation of both strategies’ efficacy is performed by calculating signal distances at lower and higher sampling rates. First, a collection of synthetic data points that resembled the P-QRS-T wave was used to train the model. Then, the ECG-ID database for real data analysis was used. Filtering to remove baseline wander followed by evaluation and testing were carried out in the real patient data. The results, in particular MSE = 0.0005, RMSE = 0.0216, and Pearson’s CC = 0.9904 for 120 sps in the case of the transformer patient data model, provide viable paths for maintaining the precision and dependability of ECG-based diagnostic systems at much lower sampling rate. Outcomes indicate that both techniques are effective at improving the fidelity between the original and modified ECG signals. Full article

Advancements in digital communications that permit remote patient visits and condition monitoring can be attributed to a revolution in digital healthcare systems. Continuous authentication based on contextual information offers a number of advantages over traditional authentication, including the ability to estimate the likelihood that the users are who they claim to be on an ongoing basis over the course of an entire session, making it a much more effective security measure for proactively regulating authorized access to sensitive data. Current authentication models that rely on machine learning have their shortcomings, such as the difficulty in enrolling new users to the system or model training sensitivity to imbalanced datasets. To address these issues, we propose using ECG signals, which are easily accessible in digital healthcare systems, for authentication through an Ensemble Siamese Network (ESN) that can handle small changes in ECG signals. Adding preprocessing for feature extraction to this model can result in superior results. We trained this model on ECG-ID and PTB benchmark datasets, achieving 93.6% and 96.8% accuracy and 1.76% and 1.69% equal error rates, respectively. The combination of data availability, simplicity, and robustness makes it an ideal choice for smart healthcare and telehealth. Full article

The intrinsic and liveness detection behavior of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals has made it an emerging biometric modality for the researcher with several applications including forensic, surveillance and security. The main challenge is the low recognition performance with datasets of large populations, including healthy and heart-disease patients, with a short interval of an ECG signal. This research proposes a novel method with the feature-level fusion of the discrete wavelet transform and a one-dimensional convolutional recurrent neural network (1D-CRNN). ECG signals were preprocessed by removing high-frequency powerline interference, followed by a low-pass filter with a cutoff frequency of 1.5 Hz for physiological noises and by baseline drift removal. The preprocessed signal is segmented with PQRST peaks, while the segmented signals are passed through Coiflets’ 5 Discrete Wavelet Transform for conventional feature extraction. The 1D-CRNN with two long short-term memory (LSTM) layers followed by three 1D convolutional layers was applied for deep learning-based feature extraction. These combinations of features result in biometric recognition accuracies of 80.64%, 98.81% and 99.62% for the ECG-ID, MIT-BIH and NSR-DB datasets, respectively. At the same time, 98.24% is achieved when combining all of these datasets. This research also compares conventional feature extraction, deep learning-based feature extraction and a combination of these for performance enhancement, compared to transfer learning approaches such as VGG-19, ResNet-152 and Inception-v3 with a small segment of ECG data. Full article

An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a unique representation of a person’s identity, similar to fingerprints, and its rhythm and shape are completely different from person to person. Cloning and tampering with ECG-based biometric systems are very difficult. So, ECG signals have been used successfully in a number of biometric recognition applications where security is a top priority. The major challenges in the existing literature are (i) the noise components in the signals, (ii) the inability to automatically extract the feature set, and (iii) the performance of the system. This paper suggests a beat-based template matching deep learning (DL) technique to solve problems with traditional techniques. ECG beat denoising, R-peak detection, and segmentation are done in the pre-processing stage of this proposed methodology. These noise-free ECG beats are converted into gray-scale images and applied to the proposed deep-learning technique. A customized activation function is also developed in this work for faster convergence of the deep learning network. The proposed network can extract features automatically from the input data. The network performance is tested with a publicly available ECGID biometric database, and the proposed method is compared with the existing literature. The comparison shows that the proposed modified Siamese network authenticated biometrics have an accuracy of 99.85%, a sensitivity of 99.30%, a specificity of 99.85%, and a positive predictivity of 99.76%. The experimental results show that the proposed method works better than the state-of-the-art techniques. Full article

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal identification technology is rapidly replacing traditional fingerprint, face, iris and other recognition technologies, avoiding the vulnerability of traditional recognition technologies. This paper proposes an ECG signal identification method based on the wavelet transform algorithm and the probabilistic neural network by whale optimization algorithm (WOA-PNN). Firstly, Q, R and S waves are detected by wavelet transform, and the P and T waves are detected by local windowed wavelet transform. The characteristic values are constructed by the detected time points, and the ECG data dimension is smaller than that of the non-reference detection. Secondly, combined with the probabilistic neural network, the mean impact value algorithm is used to screen the characteristic values, the characteristic values with low influence are eliminated, and the input and complexity of the model are simplified. Finally, a WOA-PNN combined classification method is proposed to intelligently optimize the hyper parameters in the probabilistic neural network algorithm to improve the model accuracy. According to the simulation verification on three databases, ECG-ID, MIT-BIH Normal Sinus Rhythm and MIT-BIH Arrhythmia, the identification accuracy of a single ECG cycle is 96.97%, and the identification accuracy of three ECG cycles is 99.43%. Full article

The existing electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics do not perform well when ECG changes after the enrollment phase because the feature extraction is not able to relate ECG collected during enrollment and ECG collected during classification. In this research, we propose the sequence pair feature extractor, inspired by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)’s sentence pair task, to obtain a dynamic representation of a pair of ECGs. We also propose using the self-attention mechanism of the transformer to draw an inter-identity relationship when performing ECG identification tasks. The model was trained once with datasets built from 10 ECG databases, and then, it was applied to six other ECG databases without retraining. We emphasize the significance of the time separation between enrollment and classification when presenting the results. The model scored 96.20%, 100.0%, 99.91%, 96.09%, 96.35%, and 98.10% identification accuracy on MIT-BIH Atrial Fibrillation Database (AFDB), Combined measurement of ECG, Breathing and Seismocardiograms (CEBSDB), MIT-BIH Normal Sinus Rhythm Database (NSRDB), MIT-BIH ST Change Database (STDB), ECG-ID Database (ECGIDDB), and PTB Diagnostic ECG Database (PTBDB), respectively, over a short time separation. The model scored 92.70% and 64.16% identification accuracy on ECGIDDB and PTBDB, respectively, over a long time separation, which is a significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods. Full article

In recent years, with the increasing standard of biometric identification, it is difficult to meet the requirements of data size and accuracy in practical application for training a single ECG (electrocardiogram) database. The paper aims to construct a recognition model for processing multi-source data and proposes a novel ECG identification system based on two-level fusion features. Firstly, the features of Hilbert transform and power spectrum are extracted from the segmented heartbeat data, then two features are combined into a set and normalized to obtain the elementary fusion feature. Secondly, PCANet (Principal Component Analysis Network) is used to extract the discriminative deep feature of signal, and MF (MaxFusion) algorithm is proposed to fuse and compress the two layers learning features. Finally, a linear support vector machine (SVM) is used to obtain labels of single feature classification and complete the individual identification. The recognition results of the proposed two-level fusion PCANet deep recognition network achieve more than 95% on ECG-ID, MIT-BIH, and PTB public databases. Most importantly, the recognition accuracy of the mixed database can reach 99.77%, which includes 426 individuals. Full article

The electrocardiogram (ECG) signal has become a popular biometric modality due to characteristics that make it suitable for developing reliable authentication systems. However, the long segment of signal required for recognition is still one of the limitations of existing ECG biometric recognition methods and affects its acceptability as a biometric modality. This paper investigates how a short segment of an ECG signal can be effectively used for biometric recognition, using deep-learning techniques. A small convolutional neural network (CNN) is designed to achieve better generalization capability by entropy enhancement of a short segment of a heartbeat signal. Additionally, it investigates how various blind and feature-dependent segments with different lengths affect the performance of the recognition system. Experiments were carried out on two databases for performance evaluation that included single and multisession records. In addition, a comparison was made between the performance of the proposed classifier and four well-known CNN models: GoogLeNet, ResNet, MobileNet and EfficientNet. Using a time–frequency domain representation of a short segment of an ECG signal around the R-peak, the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 99.90% for PTB, 98.20% for the ECG-ID mixed-session, and 94.18% for ECG-ID multisession datasets. Using the preprinted ResNet, we obtained 97.28% accuracy for 0.5-second segments around the R-peaks for ECG-ID multisession datasets, outperforming existing methods. It was found that the time–frequency domain representation of a short segment of an ECG signal can be feasible for biometric recognition by achieving better accuracy and acceptability of this modality. Full article

For good performance, most existing electrocardiogram (ECG) identification methods still need to adopt a denoising process to remove noise interference beforehand. This specific signal preprocessing technique requires great efforts for algorithm engineering and is usually complicated and time-consuming. To more conveniently remove the influence of noise interference and realize accurate identification, a novel temporal-frequency autoencoding based method is proposed. In particular, the raw data is firstly transformed into the wavelet domain, where multi-level time-frequency representation is achieved. Then, a prior knowledge-based feature selection is proposed and applied to the transformed data to discard noise components and retain identity-related information simultaneously. Afterward, the stacked sparse autoencoder is introduced to learn intrinsic discriminative features from the selected data, and Softmax classifier is used to perform the identification task. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on two public databases, namely, ECG-ID and Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Biotechnology arrhythmia (MIT-BIH-AHA) databases. Experimental results show that our method can achieve high multiple-heartbeat identification accuracies of 98.87%, 92.3%, and 96.82% on raw ECG signals which are from the ECG-ID (Two-recording), ECG-ID (All-recording), and MIT-BIH-AHA database, respectively, indicating that our method can provide an efficient way for ECG biometric identification. Full article

In the past decades, the electrocardiogram (ECG) has been investigated as a promising biometric by exploiting the subtle discrepancy of ECG signals between subjects. However, the heart rate (HR) for one subject may vary because of physical activities or strong emotions, leading to the problem of ECG signal variation. This variation will significantly decrease the performance of the identification task. Particularly for short-term ECG signal without many heartbeats, the hardly measured HR makes the identification task even more challenging. This study aims to propose a novel method suitable for short-term ECG signal identification. In particular, an improved HR-free resampling strategy is proposed to minimize the influence of HR variability during heartbeat processing. For feature extraction, the Principal Component Analysis Network (PCANet) is implemented to determine the potential difference between subjects. The proposed method is evaluated using a public ECG-ID database that contains various HR data for some subjects. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to HR change and can achieve high subject identification accuracy (94.4%) on ECG signals with only five heartbeats. Thus, the proposed method has the potential for application to systems that use short-term ECG signals for identification (e.g., wearable devices). Full article