In this
paper, we investigate the possibility of using heart sound as a biometric for
human identification. The most significant contribution of using heart sound as
a biometric is that it cannot be easily simulated or replicated as compared to
other conventional biometrics. Our approach consists of a robust feature
extraction scheme which is based on cepstral analysis with a specified
configuration, combined with Gaussian mixture modeling. Various experiments
have been conducted to determine the relationship between various parameters in
our proposed scheme. The results suggest that parameter values appropriate for
heart sounds should be significantly different for equivalent parameters used
in conventional cepstral analysis for speech processing. In particular, heart
sounds should be processed within segments of 0.5 second and using the full
resolution in frequency domain. Secondly, higher order cepstral coefficients,
carrying information on the excitation, are also useful. Preliminary results
indicate that with well-chosen parameters, an identification rate of up to 96%
is achievable for a database consisting of 7 individuals, with heart sounds
collected over a period of 2 months.