On the Minimal Amount of EEG Data Required for Learning Distinctive Human Features for Task-Dependent Biometric Applications

Biometrics is the process of measuring and analyzing human characteristics to verify a given person's identity. Most real-world applications rely on unique human traits such as fingerprints or iris. However, among these unique human characteristics for biometrics, the use of Electroencephalogram (EEG) stands out given its high inter-subject variability. Recent advances in Deep Learning and a deeper understanding of EEG processing methods have led to the development of models that accurately discriminate unique individuals. However, it is still uncertain how much EEG data is required to train such models. This work aims at determining the minimal amount of training data required to develop a robust EEG-based biometric model (+95% and +99% testing accuracies) from a subject for a task-dependent task. This goal is achieved by performing and analyzing 11,780 combinations of training sizes, by employing various neural network-based learning techniques of increasing complexity, and feature extraction methods on the affective EEG-based DEAP dataset. Findings suggest that if Power Spectral Density or Wavelet Energy features are extracted from the artifact-free EEG signal, 1 and 3 s of data per subject is enough to achieve +95% and +99% accuracy, respectively. These findings contributes to the body of knowledge by paving a way for the application of EEG to real-world ecological biometric applications and by demonstrating methods to learn the minimal amount of data required for such applications.