Biometric Recognition via Eye Movements: Saccadic Vigor and Acceleration Cues

Abstract

Previous research shows that human eye movements can serve as a valuable source of information about the structural elements of the oculomotor system and they also can open a window to the neural functions and cognitive mechanisms related to visual attention and perception. The research field of eye movement-driven biometrics explores the extraction of individual-specific characteristics from eye movements and their employment for recognition purposes. In this work, we present a study for the incorporation of dynamic saccadic features into a model of eye movement-driven biometrics. We show that when these features are added to our previous biometric framework and tested on a large database of 322 subjects, the biometric accuracy presents a relative improvement in the range of 31.6--33.5% for the verification scenario, and in range of 22.3--53.1% for the identification scenario. More importantly, this improvement is demonstrated for different types of visual stimulus (random dot, text, video), indicating the enhanced robustness offered by the incorporation of saccadic vigor and acceleration cues.