Investigating multi-touch gestures as a novel biometric modality

• Published in: 2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems pp. 156 - 161
• Main Authors: Sae-Bae, N., Memon, N., Isbister, K.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.09.2012
• Subjects: Biometrics (access control); Cost function; Euclidean distance; Mice; Physiology; Thumb; Training
• ISBN: 9781467313841; 146731384X
• DOI: 10.1109/BTAS.2012.6374571

We propose a new behavioral biometric modality based on multi-touch gestures. We define a canonical set of multi-touch gestures based on the movement characteristics of the palm and fingertips being used to perform the gesture. We developed an algorithm to generate and verify multi-touch gesture templates. We tested our techniques on a set of 22 different gestures. Employing a matching algorithm for a multi-touch verification system with a k-NN classifier we achieved 1.28% Equal Error Rate (EER). With score-based classifiers where only the first five samples of a genuine subject were considered as templates, we achieved 4.46 % EER. Further, with the combination of three commonly used gestures: pinch, zoom, and rotate, using all five fingers, 1.58% EER was achieved using a score-based classifier. These results are encouraging and point to the possibility of touch based biometric systems in real world applications like user verification and active authentication.