An evaluation of transfer learning models in EEG-based authentication

Electroencephalogram(EEG)-based authentication has received increasing attention from researchers as they believe it could serve as an alternative to more conventional personal authentication methods. Unfortunately, EEG signals are non-stationary and could be easily contaminated by noise and artifacts. Therefore, further processing of data analysis is needed to retrieve useful information. Various machine learning approaches have been proposed and implemented in the EEG-based domain, with deep learning being the most current trend. However, retaining the performance of a deep learning model requires substantial computational effort and a vast amount of data, especially when the models go deeper to generate consistent results. Deep learning models trained with small data sets from scratch may experience an overfitting issue. Transfer learning becomes an alternative solution. It is a technique to recognize and apply the knowledge and skills learned from the previous tasks to a new domain with limited training data. This study attempts to explore the applicability of transferring various pre-trained models’ knowledge to the EEG-based authentication domain. A self-collected database that consists of 30 subjects was utilized in the analysis. The database enrolment is divided into two sessions, with each session producing two sets of EEG recording data. The frequency spectrums of the preprocessed EEG signals are extracted and fed into the pre-trained models as the input data. Three experimental tests are carried out and the best performance is reported with accuracy in the range of 99.1–99.9%. The acquired results demonstrate the efficiency of transfer learning in authenticating an individual in this domain.