Unlock with Your Heart

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to use the vibration of the chest in response to the heartbeat as a biometric feature to authenticate the user on mobile devices. We use the built-in accelerometer to capture the heartbeat signals on commercial mobile phones. The user only needs to press the phone on his/her chest, and the system can identify the user within a few heartbeats. To reliably extract heartbeat features, we design a two-step alignment scheme that can handle the natural variability in human heart rates. We further use an adaptive template selection scheme to authenticate the user under different body postures and body states. Based on heartbeat signals collected on twenty users, the experimental results show that our method can achieve an authentication accuracy of 96.49% and the heartbeat features are stable over a period of three months.