PPG biometric recognition with singular value decomposition and local mean decomposition

Although some methods of feature extraction for photoplethysmography (PPG) biometric recognition have been extensively studied, effectiveness of local features, time cost of feature extraction, and robust identification for small-scale data remain challenging. To address these issues, we proposed a feature-extraction method of PPG biometrics combining singular value decomposition with local mean decomposition and time-domain parameters. First, we used the singular-value-decomposition method to de-noise the original PPG data. Second, we extracted the local-mean-decomposition-based and time-domain features, which are fused into a concatenated feature. Finally, we combined the concatenated feature with four classifiers for classification and decision-making. Extensive experiments on the three datasets have shown that the waveform of the PPG signal de-noised by singular value decomposition was smoother and more regular, the concatenated feature had strong inter-subject distinguishability and intra-subject similarity, and the concatenated feature combined with a random-forest classifier was the best and could achieve 99.40%, 99.88%, and 99.56% recognition rates on the respective datasets. The method is competitive with several state-of-the-art methods.